Chapter 1 Pete - 2

“A job?”

“Sweeping up, delivering flowers, that sort of thing. They’ll have to cut your hours once you start school”—regretfully—“but it’ll bring something in for the house.”

Pete looked down at his algebra exercises, which an hour ago he’d been dying to shove aside. “I won’t have time to finish this before supper if I have to go to the deli and then the florist,” he mumbled.

“Well...” His mother shrugged. “So?”

“I might need algebra someday.” Because maybe he would be an engineer. Pete wasn’t an idiot; he knew he wasn’t really going to be the toughest shamus west of the Potomac when he grew up, and he probably wasn’t going to play second base for the Washington Senators, either (his other fantasy). “Dad always said when I went to Johns Hopkins like him—”

“Oh, sweetie. You aren’t going to college .” Seeing the look on his face, his mother came over and rubbed his shoulder. “You think I could afford that? A woman alone? Times are hard.”

“Dad worked his way through. I could...” Pete fumbled. Dad had always said he could do that. That he could do anything.

“We’ll need you here, Pete. Around the house, helping with the boarders. I rely on you.” His mother pecked his cheek with a kiss. “Thank goodness you can leave school at sixteen. Or is it fifteen?” she wondered, turning back to the kitchen and cutting off Ozzie and Harriet on the radio. Lina started to whine. “Lina, you are getting on my last nerve —”

Pete sat for a while, and then he quietly packed up his homework half finished. Get going , he told himself in his toughest Mickey Spillane voice, or I’ll slap your fuzzy chin all around the block . He went to get the cabbages, but not without scrawling a last line on his letter.

Dad—Are you ever coming home?

June was heading for July, Senator McCarthy was still waving lists all over the capital, and Pete was lugging ice up to the fourth floor, his last chore of the night, pondering if trading Steve Nagy to San Francisco for Elmer Singleton was a good move for the Senators’ postseason chances, when he heard a noise: the blat of a television set.

“Mrs.Grace? MissNora?” The doors to the two apartments stood open, and both women stood before the television set in Mrs.Grace’s room. She’d wedged it on top of the minuscule bureau, and President Truman was on the screen suited and serious, glasses flashing. On Sunday June25, Communist forces attacked the Republic of Korea...

“Come in, Pete.” Absently, Mrs.Grace waved him in. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, she wore dungarees and an ancient Iowa State shirt, and she was frowning at the television. “You might have already read that we’re at war, but the president just made it official.”

“We’re not at war exactly,” Nora objected, sneezing into a handkerchief. “Aren’t they saying it’s a police action.” She’d been home from work all day with a cold; normally Pete would have been thrilled to see her in her cotton wrapper with her soft brown hair loose, but he couldn’t take his eyes off President Truman. Just a neat little man with glasses, the man no one really wanted because for so long the word President went automatically with Roosevelt ...

By their actions in Korea, Communist leaders have demonstrated their contempt for the basic moral principles on which the United Nations is founded...

“He can call it a police action if he likes. We all know a war when we see one. People are just as dead whether it’s a war or a police action that kills them.” Mrs.Grace took a tumbler off the shelf over the bureau and drew a glass of sun tea from the mason jar. “Drink that, Nora, it’ll knock the sniffles right out of you—”

“Is that the television I’m hearing?” a voice called up from the third-floor landing. “What’s Truman gassing on about now?”

“Come on up,” Mrs.Grace called, and soon red-haired Claire Hallett was standing next to Nora and frowning at the television, and so was Arlene Hupp with her drilling eyes and ribboned ponytail, and even old Mrs.Reka Muller stumped up the stairs to join them, swathed in paisley shawls, her gray hair scraped into a straggling knot.

The Communist invasion was launched in great force, with planes, tanks, and artillery. The size of the attack, and the speed with which it was followed up, make it perfectly plain that it had been plotted long in advance.

Pete shivered. He vaguely remembered seeing headlines about Korea over the last few weeks, but he’d been more concerned with the Senators’ pitching roster, with his new job sweeping up fern fronds and snippings of baby’s breath at Moonlight Magnolias, with dodging his mother’s endless list of summer chores. He wasn’t sure where Korea even was , and now the president stood on television looking worried about it. Pete had a sudden vivid memory of hearing about the Pearl Harbor attack on the radio—he’d been just four years old; he didn’t really remember what the announcer had said, only that it interrupted a show his father was listening to. How horribly pale Dad had gotten, sitting there in his chair gripping Pete so hard Pete remembered squirming. Dad had been gone with the Marines just two weeks later, Mom saying He couldn’t wait to leave us! If it hadn’t been the war, it would have been some other excuse...

Pete shivered again, and Nora laid an arm around his shoulders but he was too queasy to enjoy it.

The Soviet government has said many times that it wants peace in the world, but its attitude toward this act of aggression against the Republic of Korea...

“Soviets,” Arlene sniffed. “Of course the Reds are in the middle of this!”

Mrs.Grace shushed her, drawing glass after glass of sun tea and passing them down. Mrs.Fliss knocked at the open door, baby Angela crying fretfully against her shoulder.

“I brought jammy dodgers,” she said in her English clip, presenting a plate heaped with some kind of jam-filled cookies, and then the whole room was full of the Briarwood women, all gulping sun tea and munching cookies as they watched the light gleam off President Truman’s glasses.

The American people are unified in their belief in democratic freedom. We are united in detesting Communist slavery... President Truman intoned, looking resolute, and the lump in Pete’s throat grew.

When it was finally over and some studio music replaced the presidential broadcast, they all stood looking at one another.

“ Szar ,” old Reka Muller said suddenly and concisely, and Pete had no idea what that meant, but he thought he could guess.

“I quite agree,” said Grace. Fishing under her narrow bed, she came out with an unopened bottle of gin. “Given the occasion,” she said as she dumped about half into the mason jar of sun tea.

Everyone filled up, even Arlene Hupp, who always told anyone who asked (and anyone who didn’t) that she never touched liquor. It was Arlene who tossed her head now and said with presidential confidence, “The Russkies will use this as an excuse to invade.”

“Oh, yes.” Claire rolled her eyes. “Ivans and Pyotrs just dropping out of the sky, all over Foggy Bottom.”

“You laugh, but they’ve been making preparations for years. They’ve got the Bomb and they’re itching to use it. Once Korea goes red,” Arlene said ominously, “they’ll set their sights on us.”

“We have no way of knowing that,” Nora objected, sneezing into her sodden handkerchief.

“You may have your nose buried in fusty old documents over at the National Archives, but I work for HUAC—”

“Oh yes, you work for HUAC,” Claire snorted. “You and Senator McCarthy are bosom confidantes, I’m sure.”

“—and you wouldn’t believe the things I hear,” Arlene finished, ponytail bobbing. “If I was allowed to repeat what the men at work tell me...”

“I make it a policy never to believe more than a third of what men tell me,” Mrs.Grace said with her amused, half-lidded smile. “At work or anywhere. Who wants a sandwich? Paranoia really works up the old appetite.”

“You won’t call it paranoia when poor Pete’s having to do duck-and-cover drills in school this fall,” Arlene protested.

But somehow Mrs.Grace shoveled her into the tiny kitchen area to slab day-old bread together with peanut butter and jelly, and Pete was eyeing the last of the jammy dodgers (what kind of name for a cookie was that?) when Mrs.Grace came back to press a stack of handkerchiefs on Nora and turn to Mrs.Fliss. “You’re looking quite pale there; let me take the baby.”

“What if my Dan gets posted to Korea?” Fliss burst out. “He’s getting out in four more months. We’re supposed to go bloody house hunting —”

“No sense borrowing trouble.” Pete couldn’t help but be impressed by how calm Mrs.Grace was, burping Angela against one shoulder, removing the bottle of gin from old Mrs.Muller, who was sucking it down right from the neck. “Reka, really, that’s enough.” How did she already know everyone’s names, speak with such easy authority? She’d only been here a few weeks.

“ Kurva ,” the old woman mumbled, glaring at Mrs.Grace, but she released the bottle. Lina came clumping up the stairs then, getting into Pete’s way as he reached for the last jammy dodger. His head was all buzzy and he didn’t know why.

“I wanna cookie,” Lina whined the moment she saw the plate, opening the icebox at just the wrong moment and spilling ice everywhere. Pete remembered he’d left the bag of ice on the landing outside, probably melted by now. His mother would skin him. His eyes burned.

“I want a cookie ,” Lina persisted, knocking the loaf of bread to the floor. “Can I ask Mrs.Fliss? Can I, can I, can I, can I, can I—”

“Lina, maybe you didn’t notice that war just broke out ,” Pete snapped. His little sister glowered at him and went to glom herself onto Mrs.Grace.

“—all being entirely too casual about this,” Arlene was tutting, ferrying sandwiches out of the kitchen area. “You really think the Russkies won’t invade? The Commies have been making preparations for years . They’re in our schools, they’re infesting Hollywood so they can put their propaganda in our movies—did you see the list that came out in Red Channels ? If Orson Welles and Leonard Bernstein are Communists, anyone could— Oh no, I’m not taking a sandwich. I’ve sworn off bread, a girl has to watch her figure.”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Claire muttered, cramming down a peanut butter and jelly. Mrs.Grace was fixing Fliss a glass of sun tea one-handed as she juggled the baby; Nora had turned the radio on to the sound of Red Foley warbling “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy”; Mrs.Muller was scattering sandwich crumbs and Hungarian curses; and baby Angela had stopped crying in Grace’s arms. It was the kind of gathering Pete had always wistfully imagined happening here at Briarwood House, but never did.

And he couldn’t enjoy it, not a bit.

“Goodness, Pete, you don’t have to do that,” Mrs.Grace exclaimed when the last crumb was eaten, the last bit of sun tea drunk, the last boarder trailed off downstairs to her own room. Pete had carried all the dishes into the bathroom on the landing and was washing up in the tiny sink. “I don’t believe in doing dishes right after a party. Kills the mood too quickly.”

“Funny kind of party,” he mumbled, bringing in a load of wet plates. “Watching the president declare war.”

“Police action.” Mrs.Grace gave her sleepy smile, spreading out a towel for the plates to dry. “And you’re quite wrong, Pete—it’s times of crisis that produce the best parties. Who knows if I’d ever get all my fellow boarders up here without a television set and Mr. Truman? Goodness, that little Arlene Hupp is snippy, but if she’s one of those women who’s always on a diet, I can see why. Swearing off bread, that’s enough to put anyone in a temper...”

To Pete’s horror, he burst into tears. Stood there in the middle of Mrs.Grace’s tiny green-walled shoebox and bawled , hands over his face like a baby.

If she’d tried to hug him, he’d have flat-out died. Sunk through the floor and died. But she just pressed him gently toward the single armchair, and then she withdrew back to the kitchen area where he dimly heard the icebox opening. When he finally stopped bawling and was able to lift his shame-flushed, tear-wet face up toward hers, she was standing with a cigarette in one hand and yet another plate of sandwiches in the other. “Here,” she said. “Boys your age are always hungry.”

She’d made about twelve sandwiches. He hadn’t managed to eat at the impromptu party, but suddenly he was ravenous. He took the plate, muttering, “Mom says I’m greedy.”

“You’re not greedy, you’re growing. Eat up.” He hoped she wouldn’t start probing—when an adult nailed you with that look of piercing concern, you knew you were really in for it—but she turned away, taking a drag off her cigarette as he plowed into the sandwiches. It felt like the first time he’d really been able to fill his stomach in months. But once the food was gone he’d have to look up, probably explain himself, and he felt his cheeks flush dully again.

“’M sorry,” he mumbled through a mouthful of tuna.

“For what?” Mrs.Grace replied, apparently examining the green wall by the window.

“Detective Mike Hammer never cries.” Pete swiped at his eyes. “Even when his best friend is gunned down in cold blood.”

“Mmm. I don’t think Detective Mike Hammer is the best example to follow, you know. In more ways than one. Contrary to what the good detective thinks, a great many women don’t really like being called dames , and a man is still a man if he sheds the occasional tear. Maybe take a break from Mr.Spillane, and try Monsieur Dumas?” She tapped a paperback copy of The Three Musketeers that lay on her tiny bureau, then stood back, still examining the wall. “These green walls wouldn’t be so dreadful with a bit of decoration. You know I trained as an artist? I’m no Monet, but I can sketch—thought I’d be an illustrator for children’s books or something. I wonder if I still have my old drawing pencils...” She stubbed out the cigarette and went rummaging under the bed. “I don’t think you’re crying your eyes out because of the Communist menace in Korea,” she said over one shoulder. “What’s eating you, Hammerin’ Pete?”

He stared down at the empty plate. Somehow he’d crammed down that entire enormous heap of sandwiches. “War ruins everything.”

“How very wise of you to realize that. Most boys your age are only a few years removed from playing Nazis and Allies with imaginary guns.” She fished some artists’ pencils out of a shoebox. “What did war ruin for Pete Nilsson of Briarwood House?”

“My dad,” Pete said softly.

Mrs.Grace came to the narrow strip of wall by the window, settled on the floor cross-legged, and began to sketch right onto the bilious green paint near the baseboard. The sound of a saxophone drifted through the window—next door, Joe Reiss was playing jazz riffs again, despite the late hour.

Pete found himself going on, chasing a few crumbs around the plate. “Dad was wounded at Saipan... He got better after the war, but not really. He’d sit staring out the window, and if he wasn’t doing that he was missing work. He and Mom were always shouting, and finally two years ago he left. Just left and got a job in New Jersey. And everything started going wrong.”

Mrs.Grace’s pencil never stopped moving, flick-flick over the green wall, outlining something long and sinuous. “Like what?”

Pete didn’t even know how to put it into words. Breakfast turning from bacon and pancakes around a family table to those horrible rubbery scrambled eggs at a table full of strangers. A list of chores in Mom’s sharp printing, never getting any shorter no matter how many he ticked off before school. Lina turning from a sunny little girl to a sulky, clingy lump who could barely read the label on a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, much less a book. His mother’s plan for him to drop out of school in a few more years so he could be the Briarwood House handyman—no high school varsity baseball, no Johns Hopkins.

No Thursday nights in the kitchen helping Dad make Swedish meatballs.

No future.

He tried to say some of that, talking down to his lap, halting voice barely rising above the saxophone scales. Mrs.Grace never looked at him, thank God. Just kept drawing on the wall, rising to her knees as the sketched lines worked their way higher, then to her feet. “You’re very young to be concluding you have no future,” she said eventually, when he stuttered to a halt.

“I don’t,” Pete said. He didn’t say Mom will make sure of that , but he thought it, all right. Briarwood House handyman, assistant florist, probably a third job in there as soon as he dropped out of school—he could see it all, and guilt roiled in his stomach because he wanted to love his mother, and sometimes what pulsed through him came horribly close to hate. “Mom keeps planning our lives out like everything’s set in stone and we’re already old and we’ve already lived here forever. And that’s okay for me,” he managed to say around the lump in his throat. “It’s Lina I keep thinking about. She doesn’t have friends at school—with that lazy eye of hers they all call her Cross-Eyes, and she’s struggling in all her schoolwork, and people don’t like little girls who aren’t cute. If they aren’t cute, they have to make it up by being smart or charming or—” Trying to put his finger on it. “But she isn’t. She just sulks and scowls and clings so hard to people, they want to scrape her off like a wad of gum. She wants a proper family, an Ozzie and Harriet Nelson family, and she doesn’t have that—so she needs school. She needs people who care, and all she has is me because Mom’s too busy. And when Lina drops out of school, too, because Mom thinks she can save money if Lina makes all the boarders’ beds and does the scrambled eggs in the morning, she’ll just... fall. Right through the cracks. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch her. And I have to, right? Because that’s what big brothers do. But what if I can’t?”

And what if the world blew up because of the atom bomb? Because that was the world they lived in now, where everything could disappear into a mushroom cloud at any moment. And somehow Pete kept thinking that it could all get fixed—Lina, Briarwood House, the bomb—if Dad would just come back. Stupid, because did he really want the version of Dad that sat staring out a window and got into shouting matches with Mom?

It would be better than nothing , Pete thought, or maybe just hoped. But there was no point, because Dad hadn’t answered a single one of Pete’s letters in two years, hadn’t made a single telephone call, and Mom was quick to tell him and Lina that there hadn’t been any money sent either. “Your father doesn’t care,” she said over and over, and in this at least, Pete had to conclude she was probably right.

He swallowed, still staring down at a plate strewn with sandwich crumbs, and he finally let himself say it out loud. Let himself say the thing he’d been dreading to even think. “Dad’s never coming home.”

“Maybe not,” said Mrs.Grace.

He cried again for a while, softly. Mrs.Grace kept sketching up the wall. It was a vine, Pete saw through his tear-blurred eyes—a sinuous, fantastical vine winding vertically alongside the window, then traveling along the edge of the slanting ceiling beside it. Mrs.Grace had to stand on the bed to draw that high.

“I’ll extend the vine clear to the other side of the room,” she decided. “Get some watercolors, do a cascade of flowers in all colors... Life really hasn’t been very fair to you, Pete. I’m sorry about that.”

“Mom says life isn’t fair and that’s all there is to it.”

“Your mother says that to justify the fact that she isn’t being fair to you,” Mrs.Grace said calmly. “Which is mostly what people mean when they say ‘life isn’t fair.’ It isn’t, which is why people should endeavor to be more fair to one another, not less.”

Pete puzzled through that one. Mrs.Grace went on, outlining a curly leaf on the sketched vine.

“It isn’t fair that your father left, that you’ve been saddled with too much work in a house full of strangers, or that you’re apparently willing to let your own life land on the rubbish heap as long as the same doesn’t happen to your sister. It’s not fair—but it’s what you’ve got.”

“Thanks,” said Pete rather flatly. As far as pep talks went, this one was a real dud.

“But I will point out one thing.”

“What’s that?”

Grace March looked down at him, smiling. “You aren’t alone.”

“I feel alone,” Pete said, the lump coming up in his throat again. “I feel alone all the time.” And maybe that was the worst of it. He was going to high school soon where he’d be a minnow in a big unfriendly pond, a freshman with pimples, fit only for getting stuffed into lockers and ignored in the cafeteria—and here at Briarwood House he was the only boy in a house full of strangers who didn’t even notice one another most of the time, much less him. “No one ever talks to each other here.”

Mrs.Grace stepped down off the bed. “Maybe we can fix that.”

Every Thursday night for as long as Pete could remember, his mother went out to her bridge club at six. The ladies played for nickels, and his mother was a demon at cards, so she never missed the chance to bring home a small sackful of change. He raced through the front door at 5:48, sprinting down the street from Moonlight Magnolias—the florist liked to keep him till the very last minute, wrapping up bouquets and sweeping up leaf clippings. “You’re late,” his mom snapped, already in her coat and hat. “There’s a casserole for you and Lina; for heaven’s sake, try to heat it up without burning it this time. I’ll be back by nine. What’s that?” she asked, looking at the little nosegay of slightly wilted carnations.

“Mr.Winston let me make it up out of the day-old flowers.” Pete had tied it all together with a scrap of ribbon in his mother’s favorite mauve. He didn’t think he’d been a very good son lately—downright resentful and ungrateful, really, even if just inside his own head. So he offered her the flowers, smiling. “For you, Mom.”

“Oh. Well, that’s nice.” She regarded the flowers, then thrust them back at him. “Find a vase or something, I’m going to be late—” And out she went, heels clicking. Pete sighed, found his dad’s old Washington Senators beer mug to jam the flowers into, opened the oven to give the casserole a poke—it practically hissed at his touch—and dug Mrs. Grace’s copy of The Three Musketeers out of his back pocket. He’d just gotten to the affair of the queen’s diamonds, and who knew how that was going to turn out with Milady de Winter scheming around, when Mrs.Grace popped her head into the kitchen almost as if she’d been waiting for the door to close behind Pete’s mother.

“I’m afraid I need your help upstairs, Pete. I’m in a terrible fix.”

He raced upstairs, longing to be the man of the hour who solves a terrible fix. But when he got to Mrs.Grace’s apartment, all he saw was a pile of ingredients—packages of ground meat, a pint of milk, a massive onion—and a man standing over it. Lanky, wide-shouldered, maybe thirty, with ash-fair hair and laugh crinkles at his eyes. “No idea what we do with all this, Gracie,” he said as Grace brought Pete in. “You the expert, sport?”

“Um,” Pete said, recognizing Joe Reiss, who lived over Rosenberg’s Deli next door. Pete’s mother always sniffed at Joe, because he went around in worn-out blue jeans and threadbare T-shirts (common!), because he played in a jazz trio at the Amber Club with a Negro drummer and a Negro bassist (unnatural!), and because the three of them were always practicing with the windows open (noisy!). But Pete liked the jazz, which he could imagine Detective Mike Hammer enjoying with a dame on his arm, so he smiled tentatively at Joe before remembering. “Um, no male visitors allowed, Mrs.Grace. Not in the upper rooms—only in the parlor between the hours of five and six thirty,” he recited.

“Right. We know the rule, now we’re going to ignore it.” Mrs.Grace passed Pete a wooden spoon and turned to the heap of ingredients. “So... Swedish meatballs. We’re throwing a dinner party, and you’re the chef.”

Pete blinked. “I have a casserole to heat up downstairs.”

“What kind?”

“Tuna, potato chip, and mushroom soup.” Fast and cheap, one of his mother’s specialties.

Mrs. Grace stared, those sleepy golden-brown eyes opening up all the way. “Pete. The Founding Fathers did not create this great nation of ours so that we could let them down by combining canned tuna with instant mushroom soup. That is not a casserole, that is a war crime. Go downstairs and dump it in the trash this instant, and bring Lina back up. Tonight you’re both eating Swedish meatballs—if you can show us how it can be done on a hot plate.”

“I can’t—” Pete began. But he did remember how to make Swedish meatballs—hadn’t he watched Dad do it every Thursday night for years? Start with a finely minced onion , he could hear Dad saying. A finely minced onion makes just about everything better, Peterino, unless you’re baking a cake. That’s what your mormor used to say, and she was making this back in Malm? before I was born... Slowly, Pete picked up a knife, clumsily chopping up the onion and then some garlic. Mom didn’t use any spices but salt and pepper—“That’s for foreigners,” she’d sniff—but Mormor had sworn by garlic, or so Dad said.

“Jesus Christ on a crutch, who’s cooking?” Nora put her head round the door, still in her trim slate-gray suit from a day at the National Archives. Pete was now adding butter to the pan on the hot plate, and Mrs.Grace was mashing a bowl of diced bread scraps and milk into a slurry at his direction.

“Come in,” Mrs.Grace called. “We need someone to combine the beef and the pork. Just do whatever Pete tells you.”

“Your servant, sir.” Nora grinned, padding into the room in her stocking feet, and Pete’s heart did a flip-flop. Joe squeezed out into the hall to make room, taking up the guitar he’d stashed on the landing, and started strumming something that sounded like Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Lina had glued herself to his elbow, eyes as big as saucers.

“Who’s that playing?” Mrs. Fliss’s English voice floated up. “And what’s that smell?” By now Nora was combining the spiced meat with the soaked bread under Pete’s shy direction, and somehow the room was full. Claire with red hair exploding over her plump shoulders, the widow from 3A who Pete hardly ever saw, Fliss with Angela in her arms begging Joe “Please don’t stop playing, the baby’s been grizzling for hours and now she’s finally nodding off!” He groused “Thanks a lot!” but amiably, Gershwin changing to Duke Ellington. Soon pretty, peevish Arlene was poking her head around the door exclaiming “You aren’t supposed to have men up here, I could tell Mrs.Nilsson!” but Mrs.Grace waved her inside anyway.

“I thought you didn’t like Arlene,” Pete whispered, rolling ground meat into balls and adding them to the sizzling skillet, and Mrs.Grace just whispered back, “A successful dinner party needs just one person all the others loathe, Pete—it gives everyone something to unite against.” Pete found himself grinning when Arlene broke off sniping about house rules and moaned, “What is that smell ? I can’t have red meat, not on my new regime—”

“Diets might be good for the waistline but not for the temperament,” Grace advised. “Eat the red meat, sugar pie.”