A Piece of the World(58)

Later in the day I’ll weed and prune my flower garden, brilliant with color—poppies and pansies and an assortment of sweet peas, pale blue, peach, magenta. Red geraniums grow fat and healthy in the window in their Spry shortening cans and old blue-painted pots. I fill vases with the white lilacs that have grown beside the shed for a hundred years alongside Al’s favorite pink roses. The cats sprawl in the sun, blinking lazily. I can’t imagine anywhere I’d rather be.

But in the winter, when it’s so cold in the early morning that you can see your breath as you lie in bed, when getting to the barn requires a hoe to cut through the icy crust on top of the snow, when the wind slices branches off the trees and the sky is as dull as a stone, it’s hard to see why anyone would live here if they have a choice. Heating this old house is like heating a lobster trap. The three woodstoves must be fed constantly or we will freeze. It takes eleven cords of wood to keep the fires burning until spring. Darkness comes early without electricity. Before turning in, Al banks the stoves high with firewood to keep the embers glowing through the night. I heat bricks in the oven to wrap in towels and slide under the covers. Many nights we are in bed by eight o’clock, staring at the ceiling in separate rooms.

Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control? Perhaps these questions are impossible to tease apart because, like a tangle of seaweed on a rock, they are connected at the root. I think of those long-ago Hathorns, determined beyond all reason to leave the past behind—and we, their descendants, inheritors of their contrarian tenacity, sticking it out, one generation after the next, until every last one of us ends up in the graveyard at the bottom of the field.

THE POSTCARD, STAMPED Tokyo, features a scenic view of an arched bridge leading to a mansion with a curved roof. “Nijubashi: The Main Entrance to the Imperial Palace,” the caption says, in English, on the front, next to a string of Japanese characters. Though it’s not unlike the half-dozen postcards I’ve received in the past few months of 1945, the scrawled message from John on the other side is a surprise: “Finally, Aunt Christina—I’m coming home!”

My old friend Sadie Hamm also has reason to celebrate: her son Clyde was injured, but he is coming home with only a flesh wound to his upper arm and some shrapnel in his legs. She’s teary when she tells me the news. “It could’ve been so different for us,” she says. “When I think about what others have to endure . . .”

The postmistress Bertha Dorset’s two sons were drafted into the army, and her youngest died in France. And Gertrude Gibbons’s nephew, who grew up in Rockland and was trained as a fighter pilot, was killed over the Pacific. I never would have guessed, seeing the soldiers on Boston Common all those years ago, that another world war would engulf us. I couldn’t have imagined how much more there was to lose.

“You could drop Gertrude a note, you know,” Sadie says gently. “I’m sure it would mean a lot to her.”

“I could,” I say.

“A lot of time has passed.”

“It has.”

But though I feel a pang of sadness for Gertrude, I know I won’t reach out. I am too old, too stubborn. Her meddlesome insensitivity was something I could not—cannot, in the end—forgive.

And if I’m honest, there’s something else. Gertrude has become a stand-in for anyone who ever pitied me, didn’t try to understand me, abandoned me. She gives my bitterness a place to dwell.

IT TAKES SEVERAL weeks for John to travel by boat from Japan to Treasure Island in the South Pacific and, from there, by ferry to San Francisco, and another five days on a train to Boston, where he is officially discharged from the navy on Christmas Eve, 1945. He shows up at our house in uniform on Christmas Day with a chestful of medals, colorful packets of pastel-colored hard sugar candies called Konpeito that I don’t care for, and a newly acquired, un-Olson-like propensity to hug.

John is taller, thinner, and flinty featured, but still as mild-mannered as ever. “I can’t wait to pull my lobster boat out of the shed and get out on the water,” he tells me. “I’ve missed this place.”

He doesn’t waste any time getting settled. By spring 1946 he’s engaged to a local woman named Marjorie Jordan. “You’ll come to the wedding, won’t you, Aunt Christina?” he implores, taking my hand.

How will I ever get to a wedding when I can barely walk? “My land, you don’t need me at your wedding.”

“I most certainly do. You’re coming if I have to carry you there myself.”

I motion for him to come closer. I don’t know what to say, but I want to say something. I’m touched that he wants me there. “I’m glad you survived,” I tell him when he crouches down beside me.

Laughing, he kisses me on the cheek. “I’m glad I survived, too. So you’ll come?”

“I’ll come.”

Sadie claps her hands together when I tell her the news. “What fun! All right, then, we need to find you a dress. I’ll take you into Rockland.”

“Not store-bought. I’m going to make it myself.”

She looks at me doubtfully. “How long has it been since you sewed anything?”

“A while, I guess.” I hold my gnarled hands out, palms up. “I know they look frightful, but they work just fine.”