A Cup of Tea - Amy Ephron [32]
“The casualties have been so extensive,” he said. “There isn’t a family in New York that hasn’t been touched by this.” He didn’t need to say more. There was no doubt about what came after that sentence, although he went on in some detail.
The next thing Eleanor was aware of, she was on the street, as though she’d lost a patch of time, had no memory of anything except staring at the map of Europe on the wall behind the desk strategically marked with thumbtacks…and then she was pushing the baby down Lexington, gripping the handles of the stroller so tightly, her knuckles were whitened, lost in a memory of her own.
The carriage pulled up on a street corner that looked more like an alleyway. There was laundry hanging from windows and people standing idly on street corners as if they had nowhere else to go. The carriage stopped in front of a tenement building. An old woman was evident in an upstairs window hanging sheets on a rope of clothesline.
A twelve-year-old girl with a dirty face and a torn dress sat on the stoop of a building next door. Her shoes looked as if the soles were worn, cold, sitting there without a sweater.
Eleanor turned to Philip in the carriage next to her. “You wanted to see where I’m from,” she said. “A street just like this one. A street you’d find in any city, if you chose to look for it.”
She pulled the silk shawl tighter around her shoulders.
Philip spoke to the driver. “We can go now,” he said.
Did she imagine in that moment that he was taking her away from it forever?
When she got back to the apartment, she put Tess down in her crib.
He will never see his baby.
She walked over and looked at herself in the mirror. Slowly, she undid the many buttons of her dress. She put a hand on her breast and tried to lose herself in a memory of her own. In the crib, Tess started crying. She walked over and gently rocked the crib and began to sing to her.
Hush little baby, don’t say a word.
Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing…
Her voice cracked.
There was a mobile hanging over the baby’s crib, glass petals in the shape of teardrops that in the daytime caught the light and splashed a rainbow across the quilt. She knocked the mobile and the petals made a sound like bells.
When Josie came home with Jimmy Donohue, Eleanor was asleep in the chair in the living room wrapped in the silk shawl. She woke up as soon as she heard the front door shut. Her face was streaked from crying.
“He’s dead, Josie. He’s dead. And he’s never coming back to me.” She began to cry uncontrollably. Josie slipped herself into the chair beside her friend and held her head in her lap until she’d quieted down. In the next room, the baby started to cry and Jimmy Donohue went to comfort her. “It’s no different than it was,” said Eleanor looking up at Josie. “I always knew I’d be alone with her.”
And then she said no more about it. She didn’t go out for a week. Josie and Jimmy Donohue took care of her and Tess.
It was shortly after this that she took up with the producer, Robert Doyle, who, understanding the circumstances of her life, treated her as if she were a rare and fragile creature.
Doyle was content to wait and in the meantime take whatever she felt that she could offer. He liked having her on his arm. He formed a strong attachment to the baby whom he showered with gifts. No one understood why she didn’t marry Doyle; a lot of girls in her situation would have. Except she once said to Josie, by way of explanation, “I can’t do it unless I feel that I can love him.” Outwardly, Eleanor seemed to be all right, but she was so much about looking one way when she actually felt another, that it was difficult to tell. She and Rosemary had that in common.
As for Jane Howard, she felt as if she were observing a situation where everyone around her, partly due to their lack of information and skewed perceptions, was in an altered state. A situation she could correct if she set her mind to it, if she could only see