The Five Towns: A Novel

By Leslie Tonner

Set against the backdrop of post–World War II America, this sweeping novel follows three very different families as they search for love and fulfillment in Long Island’s fabled gilded ghetto, the Five Towns

In 1950, the Five Towns are a burgeoning suburban destination for those in search of a better life. Arthur Freundlich is one of those pioneers. With the recent influx of Jews to Long Island, the former GI has relocated his mother, pregnant wife, and three-year-old daughter from a tiny apartment in Queens to a split-level house in Cedarhurst—a world apart from the cramped quarters of Brooklyn and Queens that Arthur knew.
 
In his wealthy, insulated corner of this formerly WASP-y small-town community, Harvard-educated John Dodge lives with his wife and their son Christopher, who causes a scandal when he falls in love with beautiful, Jewish Melanie Miller.
 
A black woman struggling to raise her family in turbulent times, Lulu Pearce leaves blue-collar Inwood every morning to work as a maid in middle-class homes in Woodmere. But an unwanted pregnancy could forever alter the course of her future.
 
As America comes of age, these three families battle bigotry, racism, and dramatically changing mores in one of Long Island’s most famous suburban enclaves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781497637061

Leslie Tonner

Leslie Tonner is the author of eight books, both fiction and nonfiction. She and her family live in Manhattan. 

Book preview

Part One: The Pioneers

1950

CHAPTER ONE

The Long Island Railroad train approached the crossing at Cedarhurst Avenue and the little man came out of the gatehouse to lower the black-and-white-striped wooden barriers that stopped traffic on either side of the railroad tracks. The 10:36 from Pennsylvania Station (change at Jamaica) slowed a bit as it pulled into the Cedarhurst station and the Freundlich family got a good look at the line of cars waiting behind the barriers. In each car there were families riding together, fathers, mothers and children, the back seats of the vehicles laden with parcels and bundles of Saturday purchases. In the Five Towns, Cedarhurst was the town most synonymous with shopping but the Freundlichs were not yet aware of this fact. They had never been to Cedarhurst before; in fact, they had had little experience with this new phenomenon known as the suburbs. They were city people, and had made their way closer to Nassau County, Long Island, by moving to Forest Hills in Queens.

Arthur Freundlich had brought his family out on the train because life in the Forest Hills apartment building had grown impossibly close. There was hardly enough room to move around their small, square living room, what with the armchairs, couch, and breakfront, to say nothing of the fact that the couch became his mother’s bed at night and he and his wife, Evelyn, were evicted from their living room. Amy, their three-year-old daughter, occupied the second small bedroom, but Evelyn was pregnant again and it was obvious that they had to move. He’d heard friends discussing Long Island—its green vistas, its convenient shopping, its accessibility to New York City, which was important since Evelyn insisted that she remain close to things cultural. But, more than this, he’d heard that it was possible to live the good life in a place just recently open to more and more Jewish families.

The Five Towns had by no means been a restricted community; there had been Jewish families living there both permanently and during the summers for at least several decades. Still, there had never been an influx of Jewish families quite like what was occurring in these post–World War II years, and Freundlich was conscious that he might at last have found a place where he could settle permanently and belong to a community in a way that he could not in Forest Hills. He’d been raised as an apartment child, become for a brief time a college commuter, then an enlisted GI in an army barracks, an interloper in his in-laws’ home following the disarray after the war, and now a renter on his own. He wanted to own something at last, and land, and a home built on that land, was his investment of choice. Could this be the place? Judging from what he’d heard and from what he saw outside the train’s dusty windows, the Five Towns might have possibilities.

He had a little money put aside, a few dollars saved since the last years of the Forties when his TV-table business had begun to show a profit. Then too, his mother had offered to invest a small amount she’d put aside, in view of the fact that she’d be living with them. He didn’t say no. He’d never felt he was the favored son in his family; that distinction belonged to his long-lost older brother, Edward. It was about time his mother thought him worthy of a financial investment, so he took her money and added it to his small pile and decided he had enough for a down payment.

The real-estate agent he’d called turned out to be Jewish. His name was Morris Susskind. Freundlich had been relieved at the sound of Susskind’s voice. He’d been afraid they’d end up with some proper gentile showing them this new place to live, and then they’d never have been able to ask the right questions, the important questions. You couldn’t raise your child in a solidly gentile environment. What if there weren’t very many other Jews on the block, or enough synagogues, or even, God forbid, if there were anti-Semitism? Who knew? This Susskind obviously would; he said he’d lived out there for seven years.

Susskind had told him to look for a large black car when they arrived at the Cedarhurst station, and as Freundlich scanned the automobiles pulled up near the small wooden station house he noticed an enormous Cadillac sitting to one side, pointed in the direction of the small park across the way. A stocky man in a dark suit waved, and Freundlich stepped down from the train carrying Amy, followed by his wife and then his mother, who negotiated the steps slowly, planting both feet firmly on each step, as she groaned and muttered her way to the platform below.

Take it easy, Momma, Evelyn urged as she extended her hand to help her. Evelyn hoped what she was wearing was right for coming out to the suburbs. She’d wondered if her city best would look correct in the country, a dark blue dress with a jacket, her good pearls, white gloves, and matching navy blue handbag and shoes. She looked swiftly around the station. No one was staring at her. She took her mother-in-law’s arm and guided her toward the car.

Have a pleasant trip? Susskind asked as he opened the car doors and gestured for them to get in. The upholstery was dark and as Evelyn Freundlich slid over she felt the late-summer heat against her nylon stockings and through the back of her linen dress. The pressing she’d given it would be ruined in only a few minutes. She reached out her arms for Amy, who was clad in a pink smocked dress with puffed sleeves and a little white collar already smudged with traces of grime. Amy’s patent leather shoes were dusty from the train ride and her face looked cross and uncomfortable in the heat. But just when Evelyn thought the weather was impossible and why wasn’t it cooler in the country, a breeze blew through the automobile carrying a scent of salt and water, the ocean, and Evelyn raised her face and closed her eyes and decided that if she would be able to smell the sea and feel the cool draft, she would be just fine in the Five Towns.

Some weather, huh? Susskind said pleasantly as he got in behind the wheel. Freundlich was sitting next to the agent in the front. The car moved down Cedarhurst Avenue and made a right turn at the corner of West Broadway. Susskind drove quickly but he stopped the car badly, slamming on the brakes and causing the occupants of the back seat to lurch forward uncomfortably.

Freundlich, who disliked machinery and knew little about how anything mechanical worked, fished around in his mind for some technical reference he could throw out about automobiles. Some transmission, eh? was all he finally said as the car passed the sheltering trees bending over the large homes located close to the street.

Susskind shrugged. He raised his voice so Mrs. Freundlich, Evelyn, and Amy might hear him. You’ll notice that this area has quite a few of the older style of homes built before the war, some back even further. There’s no representative sort of house here, not like what they’re doing in Levittown, he said, pressing down on the brakes, hard, and turning around to look at his audience in the rear. Of course, these would be more money than we discussed, close to five figures for your down payment alone.

The Freundlichs nodded obediently. It was a wild enough dream for them to consider owning their own home, let alone in an area where other people had houses like this.

And, Susskind continued, this is only Cedarhurst. Later on, we’ll go for a drive through some of Lawrence. I want to show you how people can really live out here.

The car sped by several small, adjoining stores, a tiny grocery, a Chinese laundry, a shabby store with a Coca-Cola luncheonette sign over the door. Evelyn Freundlich stared at them and wondered about where she would shop, wondered how she would learn to drive, because it was apparent that in this community you had to have a car. She’d seen no buses, taxis, or anything resembling public transportation since she’d stepped off the train.

We’re in Woodmere now, Susskind said cheerfully. I suppose you might’ve come in at the Woodmere station, but I’m so close to Cedarhurst at the office, you know, every extra minute there I may get another call. The housing market’s really booming now. He slammed on the brakes and they made a left turn onto a newly paved street. Tiny pebbles crunched and popped up beneath the wheels of the car. Several flew up and hit the hood. Amy laughed delightedly. The houses on the street looked newer, fresher, and smaller than the ones on the main artery.

This is Highland Avenue, Susskind said. It’s not where the houses I’m going to show you are, but the street we’re going to doesn’t go through to West Broadway. It’s a lot newer, too, so don’t expect too much in the way of progress right now.

As they rode down the street, they could see the plots of land on which the houses sat shrink perceptibly as the houses grew newer.

These are mostly splits, Susskind pointed out, somewhat like the ones we’ll be looking at. They turned at the next corner and the car moved from a paved surface onto a rutted dirt road that was covered with fresh, deep tire tracks and diagonal slashes of dirt pushed aside by bulldozers. The car’s occupants held their breath as the Cadillac bounced dangerously over the torn-up road and turned onto another street, where they were greeted by the sight of one finished house, three half-finished houses, and one skeletal wooden frame of a fifth. This is it, piped Susskind. All out.

He had stopped the car in front of the finished house, which had no front lawn, no trees, no shrubbery. A large wooden sign was planted in the dirt next to a path of wooden planks that had been laid across several gaping holes filled with stagnant rainwater. Model Home, the sign read, Deluxe new community, 3 Bedrooms, 1 and ½ baths, all-electric kitchen, garage, easy access to schools and shopping.

Evelyn Freundlich, reading the sign from the back of the car, wondered where the schools and shopping might be. There was no sign of anything beyond the lots cleared for the five houses, only a line of trees that indicated the start of a fairly dense patch of woods and the sight of the tops of the houses on Highland Avenue, where they’d just driven.

What’s the name of this street? Evelyn asked.

Bush Road, Susskind said, opening the car doors.

That’s a joke, Dora Freundlich put in. You can’t see any bushes around here. Just a lot of dirt. Her dirt came out sounding a bit like doit, and for a brief moment her son was slightly embarrassed. He wasn’t sure why he was disconcerted in the presence of this Jewish real-estate agent, but he had the feeling that the Jews of the Five Towns had left all their Bronx-and-Brooklynese behind them when they made the move to the suburbs. He was tired of the relentless, old-time Judaism he’d been exposed to throughout his youth and hoped there would be something more modern available. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be Jewish; it was simply that he didn’t want to constantly think Jewish. He would like to be able to take it for granted.

They stood in the yellow-orange dirt of the makeshift road and stared at the model house, Freundlich dreaming of security and comfort, Dora Freundlich thinking that she’d imagined they’d get more for their money, Evelyn Freundlich worrying what you’d do with no neighbors and who knew what problems lurking in the nearby woods that were threats to little girls playing outside, and Amy fretting over the lack of sidewalks, already close to tears because she might have to give up hopscotch, jump rope, and roller skating.

The house faced them, implacably new, its shingles painted white, shutters framing the windows colored a light gray, everything brand-new and cheerless, still wreathed in sawdust, spackled with bits of plaster and paint, and shiny with disuse. Shall we? Susskind said, sweeping out his hand and indicating to the ladies that they should pass.

They obediently trooped up the quavering wood planks, Dora Freundlich inching along behind her daughter-in-law. Not what I expected, she said to Evelyn, who ignored her as they moved toward the front door. The front stoop was in, a poured concrete square that seemed to have tilted and cracked already. Evelyn stopped, drew up her courage, and called out to Susskind, telling him the house was falling down.

He laughed. We’re building on marshy ground here, right on top of water, really. The houses are built on pilings sunk right into the ground, so it will take some settling in. But it’s not Venice, you know. You’ll need a Ford to get around, not a gondola.

Evelyn stared at the concrete skeptically as her mother-in-law stepped in front of the door, stared, and pointed curiously at the doorframe. You suppose that has some purpose? she said to Evelyn.

Evelyn stared. Right over the doorbell, built into the little metal enclosure, was a tiny light, like the sort of light the doctor shines in your eyes, only here it was planted right over the bell, and although it was broad daylight, it shone steadily on. Waste of electricity, Dora said, clucking her tongue. Evelyn could see that she was settling in for a fight. She sighed, and waited for the men to come, Arthur with Amy in his arms, Susskind following close behind, talking quickly as he pointed out mysterious, complicated things about crawl spaces, septic tanks, and utility wires. Evelyn noticed the telephone poles placed at regular intervals where the lines would be strung, and then she wondered why the builders hadn’t left any trees. Judging from the nearby woods, there had been plenty of trees in the area. Why not leave a few behind? She opened her mouth to ask Susskind, but he shouldered past her, popped a key in the lock, and pushed open the door.

Ladies, he said. And they stepped inside the house, ready to see what the suburbs had to offer.

Sunlight streamed, unimpeded, through the panes of glass which still bore the marks of the adhesive labels the builders had only partly scraped off. The front door led into a square foyer with a floor covered in white tiles with a gold fleur-de-lis pattern. There were footprints all over the tile where the workmen had carelessly tracked in mud. Extending from the foyer into the living room was wall-to-wall carpeting, protected by long plastic runners.

Evelyn peered into the living room. The model furniture was French, one of the Louis eras, Evelyn wasn’t sure which, painted antique white with gold accents. There were scenes of classical antiquity in elaborate frames hanging on the walls. Evelyn had to close her eyes to imagine away the furniture and concentrate on the room’s good points. There was a large picture window extending across the back, giving a full view of the dirt mounds in the backyard. Someday, with landscaping and trees, the vista would be pleasant.

Off the rear of the living room was the dining room, a smaller, square room with more windows, and through that, toward the front of the house and accessible from the foyer as well, was the kitchen. It was there that Evelyn found Dora, inspecting the refrigerator and stove and making clucking noises with her tongue.

No pilot light, she said to Evelyn.

It’s electric, mother, Evelyn said patiently.

What? How do you know when it’s on? What kind of cooking is it, no flame?

Very clean, came Susskind’s voice. He’d just come through the foyer and was jovially eager to point out the up-to-date features of everything in this house. He’d sell them the stove, and then the refrigerator, which Dora called the icebox, and then the hookups in the rear of the garage for a washer and dryer.

And wait, I’ve even forgotten about the dishwasher. He gestured at a door next to the sink, which he opened and pulled down. Inside were wire baskets. Hotpoint, he said proudly. One of the best in the business.

Dora stared dubiously. She washed everything at the sink in scalding water and could never believe the gowned hostesses on TV telling her about the joys of letting the machines do it.

A wail came from the foyer where Amy, who had been trying to skid on her slippery shoe soles, had fallen down and scraped both knees. Arthur brought the little girl in to her mother, who scolded her as she wet a handkerchief to apply to the bruises.

An apartment child, Susskind remarked as he offered Amy one of the Charms from the package he always kept in his pocket. My own kids were the same. They didn’t understand playing on the lawn. They thought if it wasn’t pavement, if it didn’t scrape them up good, it wasn’t really playing. I had to chase them off the driveway for months. He gave Evelyn a careful look. All through? How about a gander at the powder room?

Evelyn followed him through the foyer toward a door she’d thought was a closet. When he opened it and flipped on the light, she gasped with surprise. The room, though tiny, had been papered in a dazzling blue, and the sink and tiles and toilet matched. There were fluffy fingertip towels hanging on the racks and fragrant little flower-shaped ovals of guest soap in a china dish. In Forest Hills there was only one bathroom and guests had to jockey for position at the sink with Arthur’s shaving things, Amy’s Mickey Mouse water glass, or Dora’s false teeth in a jelly jar.

Shall we head upstairs? Susskind said. He knew he had them then.

And he knew he’d have them in the future, once this house grew too small for them. At $17,000 right now, with the help of a GI mortgage, it was a bargain, but it was not the house of their dreams. Susskind knew they had wider dreams. They were the ones who had lived through the war, the ones who’d waited to get what they wanted. The Great Deservers, Susskind called them, and most of the men were just like Freundlich. They would not decide. Their wives and mothers would.

They toured the upstairs briefly, then returned to the first floor for a last look around. As they stepped outside into the sunshine, Amy spotted some birds pecking at the dirt on the lawn. Pigeons, she said, for those were the only birds she knew. And her mother stared at her father, and Arthur knew the house would be his.

How about a little ride around before I take you back to the train? said Susskind.

As they followed him to the car, they heard a noise overhead and, looking up, they saw the silver body of a plane glinting in the light, a shiny propeller plane making a slow descent before landing.

The car turned onto a curved road winding deeper into a heavily wooded area, and the Freundlichs could see that this was a different world from what lay closer to the main roads. Here the streets were serene and quiet, shaded from the hot sun that here and there pushed through the leaves and dappled the road with small puddles of light. Far back from the road lay large Tudor-style estate houses, gargantuan spreads of dark, peaked stone with half-mile-long driveways that approached the main house, and old-style gatehouses guarding the entrance to the street. There were no signs of life or human habitation, just a sweet silence broken only by the sound of their car and an occasional outburst from a passing bird.

This is mostly a gentile section, Susskind said. People who’ve been here a long time. They were never exactly restricted out here, but you won’t find too many Jews in this particular neighborhood.

The Freundlichs were awed by what they saw in the back of Lawrence. It was light-years away from the houses on Bush Road, centuries removed from Forest Hills, signs of a past that had eluded them, a past rooted in the ownership of a home in one place. These families did not start out inhabiting split-levels.

The car approached a stretch of land surrounding a modest building set fairly close to the road. The Freundlichs could see stables off to one side and tennis courts. Men in proper sports dress—white shorts and shirts—hit polite serves to each other. Just as the car pulled up near the main building and Susskind was explaining that this was the Rockaway Hunting Club, a bastion of gentiles restricted to non-Jews, a small group of horses and riders pulled onto the road and Susskind slammed on the brakes.

The riders stared at the Cadillac. They were dressed in hunting attire—red jackets, black ribbon-trimmed hats, black breeches, and high leather boots, the riding clothes slightly worn with use and age, as if to underline the seriousness of these people on horseback. They were not Saturday riders; they were horse lovers and hunt lovers, and this was their turf. They stared down at the interlopers in the long black car. The horses shifted from foot to foot, nodding their heads lazily in the heat, their bodies gleaming with wetness after their long ride. No one said a word, and then the first rider, a tall man with penetrating gray eyes, clucked to his horse and the party moved slowly across the road, the horses’ hooves reverberating loudly on the pavement.

Freundlich watched the riding party in agony. Was this the life he’d have to confront in order to gain entry into the community? Was the world outside the enclaves he knew in Brooklyn and Queens made up of fancy-dress goyim staring down their noses at intruding Jews? He wondered just what he was letting himself in for, then he glanced at Susskind, who was flipping the pages of house listings on a clipboard as he waited for the horses to cross. It didn’t seem to bother him, and he was as Jewish as the Freundlichs. In fact, to the naked eye, even more Jewish, more in the mold of what the outside world might identify as Semitic.

After the horrors of the war, Freundlich had vowed to live with Jews because that was safer, because that was where he belonged. What he didn’t know yet was that he was about to buy a home in what would come to be known as a gilded ghetto, despite the presence of these WASPs and some blacks, Italians, and a few stray Catholics of varying ethnic backgrounds. The Five Towns would take its identity from the Susskinds and Freundlichs and Levys and Cohens who lived there and who learned to work closely with the Hunt Club crowd when the good of the community was at stake. It would become a fairly peaceful coexistence. But Jews would never belong to the Hunt Club and would turn up only at the yearly Fourth of July fireworks display—held, perversely, on the evening before the Fourth.

The riders finished crossing without a backward glance at the car. Susskind pressed down on the accelerator, hard, and the car moved quickly away, kicking up a cloud of dust that spilled through the sunlight and caught the light in such a way that it looked, for a moment, like a shower of gold.

CHAPTER TWO

Evelyn Turetsky lived in a part of the Upper West Side of Manhattan that was known, in the 1930s, as the Jewish half-mile. In 1941 she was twenty-one years old, a recent graduate of New York University, a bright, sensitive girl with a strong desire to become a lawyer. Her mother informed her that this was not to be the fate of a Jewish girl from West End Avenue. Smart girls don’t get husbands, Mrs. Turetsky said, and she took Evelyn to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her a new fall wardrobe: jackets with padded shoulders, and sling-back shoes, and black dinner suits, and a long dress for dancing.

Evelyn took a job in a department store, working as an assistant buyer in lingerie. Being assistant buyer meant a lot of work that bored her, filling out invoices, taking inventory, running errands for the buyer, a nasty, chain-smoking woman with a hacking cough who thought Evelyn ought to go home to mother and who made fetching every cup of coffee a challenge to Evelyn’s sense of self-worth. Can’t you even do black-with-sugar decently? the woman would say, not looking at Evelyn as she grabbed the cup from her hand. Evelyn would turn away and think of Trevelyan’s History of England and of the development of the English judicial system and wonder why she couldn’t be studying torts and briefs and Supreme Court cases instead of worrying over negligees and peignoirs and monogrammed matching pillow slips.

In the summer of 1941, Evelyn was fixed up with Arthur Freundlich due to the intervention of Arthur’s cousin Gladys, who lived in the same building as the Turetskys. Evelyn had never thought about her looks too much, partly because her mother was always nagging her to stand up straight, fix her lipstick, and comb her hair, but the night she went out with Arthur she knew she looked attractive. He took her to dinner and later to a place where there was dancing. She was short, slender, and dark, and Arthur, who was six feet tall, hovered over her protectively on the dance floor. His palms were dry, a nice change from many previous blind dates, and he was well spoken and thoughtful, even though he hadn’t finished college. He was working for his father in the garment district; they made undergarments. Evelyn thought it amusing that both of them dealt in underwear. Arthur spoke proudly of the company’s financial health, of his father’s strong hand guiding everything, and then commented vaguely on his older brother, Edward, who was a gifted musician. Evelyn couldn’t decide if Arthur loved or hated his brother.

After their first date they began to see each other steadily. There were trips to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants play baseball, nights at the movies, long hours spent at the Schrafft’s near Evelyn’s apartment house, where they had sodas and held hands under the tiny tables. Evelyn wasn’t sure if she was in love, but she always felt pleasant around Arthur, if a bit unfamiliar with his interest in business and sports. She kept her own fondness for reading and music and art well hidden. Her mother had taught her not to impose her desires on men. You have to draw them out, Mrs. Turetsky counseled. Make them feel important. So Evelyn and Arthur continued to discuss Mel Ott and boxer shorts and the weather.

They were at a football game the day it was learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. As they left the stadium together, Arthur suddenly seemed older and more mature, full of hardened resolution. He spoke of fighting, and Evelyn grew afraid and took his arm. It was the first time she’d ever reached out and touched him. Two weeks later he came to her home to tell her he’d enlisted, and she started to cry. Mr. Turetsky, a sentimental man and a patriot, pumped Arthur’s hand and offered him a drink. Arthur promised to return on leave, after basic training, and Evelyn said she would write to him. They kissed passionately by the elevator, and the elevator man, Bowie, gave Evelyn a hard look as Arthur stepped inside the car with his face smeared with lipstick.

Weeks later, Arthur returned to Evelyn. She had spent a tormented two months hating her job, harassed by the buyer, prodded by her mother to date other men, anxiously waiting for letters from Arthur. He wasn’t much of a correspondent, but what he did say, in his infrequent but ardent letters, was that he thought of nothing but her, that he adored her madly, and wanted to speak to her when he was finished with his training.

What he had to say shocked her. He wanted to get married. Arthur, tall and thin and straight-shouldered in his green uniform, would rescue Evelyn from her mother, her job, and her unhappy life. The Turetskys, skeptical and opposed to a wartime marriage, finally gave their consent and a quick wedding was arranged, a small affair with a Jewish ceremony followed by a wedding breakfast. Evelyn wore a suit with a printed blouse, Arthur his uniform. The ladies sported orchid corsages. Mrs. Freundlich wept and talked wildly to her sisters in German. Edward Freundlich was the best man; handsome and sophisticated, he held himself aloof from the guests and smoked many cigarettes during the meal, barely touching his food.

Evelyn, fascinated by the appearance of the brother she’d never met before, could not see any family resemblance between Arthur and his brother. Edward had a cold, mannered male beauty totally unrelated to his younger brother’s open-handed, easier ways. Arthur described his brother as reticent; to Evelyn, Edward was remote, close-lipped, and almost dangerous in his dark-eyed self-involvement. She wondered what he was about, wondered where his passion for music came in, for she could see nothing beyond his chilly demeanor. His lips brushed her cheek after the ceremony and she felt her skin turn cold as if a gust of icy wind had touched her face.

They left immediately for Arthur’s advanced-training course at Fort Bragg, and Evelyn learned right away what the fate of an enlisted man’s wife would be in a world at war. Jammed onto overcrowded trains, jostled by all manner of men in uniform, leered at and looked over, forced to stand because men in uniform seemed to have abandoned even the most common of courtesies, she wondered what she had done, marrying this private. In stations along the way, in the ladies’ rooms where she combed her hair and applied more lipstick, she was snubbed by the officers’ wives who turned away abruptly when they found out her husband’s rank. Their clothes were, in many cases, not as nice as Evelyn’s, but that didn’t seem to matter. He had no rank and it followed that she didn’t either. Arthur had refused a spot in officer candidate school because it would have delayed his entry into the war. But Evelyn saw that it would have made her life easier, and she was sorry.

There was no housing for them close to Fort Bragg, so they found a room in a boardinghouse miles away. A local taxi picked up Arthur and several buddies each morning at 5:00 A.M. to have them on post in time for morning formation. He came home exhausted every night at 6:00 P.M. and was asleep by 8:30 or 9:00. Evelyn had nothing to do all day but read, knit, or walk along the town’s one main street, which had wooden sidewalks and a general store.

Evelyn’s unhappiness grew very deep throughout those first months, and nothing that followed alleviated her feelings of self-pity. Cut off from the libraries, museums, and concert halls she loved, wrenched from her family who began to seem like a haven of warmth and love, she followed her husband’s wanderings across the South, through Georgia, Tennessee, and into Texas, with a sinking heart. Arthur was not the strong man she’d thought he was; he showed signs of terrible weakness and immaturity. He gambled away his paycheck, went drinking with friends and left her alone for hours on end in quiet little backwater towns where the local townspeople held an occasional barroom brawl right outside her bedroom window. By the time they’d been together a year, Evelyn was considering fleeing the army and her husband for a life back home in her mother’s house. And it was after her mother paid her a visit, and saw what Evelyn’s life was like, that she told Arthur she couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to go.

He looked at her with his sad eyes and told her he’d probably get sent overseas within a few months anyway. You don’t have to stay, he said. He patted her arm gently. She wished he would grab her and make her stay. He didn’t. He let her go. He got her a ride with an army driver as far as the nearest bus station, which was fifty miles from where they were staying. The driver was drunk and drove so badly that Evelyn thought she would be dead by morning. She was furious that she had no husband to protect her and she arrived back in New York, after a seventy-two-hour bus trip, in a state of hysteria.

Her mother put her to bed with an I told you so and a cup of hot tea laced with brandy. After making certain Evelyn wasn’t pregnant, she suggested her daughter find a job. Evelyn, weak with misery and guilt, called her former boss from the lingerie department and was rehired. When Arthur wrote to tell her he was going away in a month (she learned this from what had been censored in his letter, piecing together the missing bits), she wasn’t sorry at all. She didn’t really feel married.

Her lingerie-buyer boss was as bad as ever, but wartime had brought out a sleazier side of the woman, and this made her a far more interesting working companion than before. Evelyn quickly got an education in wartime peccadillos, listening to stories of black-market barter; adultery; abortions; long, drunken parties that sounded much like orgies to Evelyn’s astonished ears. Her boss seemed to enjoy telling her these stories, as if by initiating the girl into life she were somehow gaining a convert to her own religion.

It was after a teary scene with Arthur just before his departure for Boston, where he was to ship out overseas, that Evelyn decided to accept her boss’s invitation to one of these parties. Arthur had behaved childishly, as if he had expected Evelyn to be running around with other men and doing wild things on her own. Evelyn, who had been living chastely in her parents’ apartment, felt utterly wronged and misunderstood by this uniformed stranger. Had she really married him? Had they been living together at all? It had been less than six months since she’d left him in Texas, but Evelyn felt it might as well have been years. She realized, sadly, that they had nothing in common.

She went to work the day after the scene with Arthur in a state of despair and, after spilling coffee on a suitcase full of samples, was taken to task by her boss. What the hell is wrong with you? You got two left hands? You leave your brain in the bathtub to soak overnight? Huh? Come on, tell me. And it better be good.

Evelyn burst into tears and repeated some of her argument with Arthur. She wiped at her eyes with one of the