As Bright as Heaven(19)

So there we were, trying to make sense of a dining room that had been treated like a storage closet for three decades, when Dora Sutcliff showed up. She had been over to the house a few times before. I had met her the day we moved in, when Charlie Sutcliff came over to haul our belongings up the stairs. She’d come over with him and brought a loaf of warm bread that we’d enjoyed at dinnertime with Mrs. Landry’s flavorless split pea soup. She’s been over a couple times since, to bring us a pie or homemade jam, and she’s had Mama over for afternoon coffee a time or two. Dora is dark-haired and slender, with doelike eyes. She has a soft voice, like Jamie’s, but she talks far more than he does. She is nearly always worried about something, whether it’s a forecast of bad weather or a threat to her family’s health or that we might have to start rationing sugar. She likes to start sentences with “My stars! Have you heard?” And then she’ll tell us some deeply troubling fact that we have heard but that had seemed inconsequential to us.

After Mama apologized for the state the four of us were in—cobwebs in our hair and dust on our sleeves—she politely asked Mrs. Sutcliff if she’d like to come into the sitting room for some coffee. Mrs. Sutcliff said she couldn’t stay. They’d just found out Jamie’s report date to Fort Meade had been bumped from three weeks to tomorrow. The send-off party she’d been planning and hadn’t yet told us about would have to be tonight. She wanted us all to come to it.

“This will be the last time we’re all together before he is shipped off to France,” Mrs. Sutcliff said, her eyes filling with tears the second she said France. These days saying France is the same as saying the word war. It was obvious Mrs. Sutcliff didn’t want Jamie to go and that perhaps she wasn’t very happy that he’d volunteered when he wasn’t yet required to register.

Mama thanked her and said she’d be happy to accept for all of us. She touched Mrs. Sutcliff’s arm when she added we’d be honored to come. Mrs. Sutcliff flicked away a tear as she looked at all of us.

“You are so lucky to have three such lovely daughters, Pauline,” Mrs. Sutcliff said. She was no doubt also thinking how even luckier my mother was that girls don’t have to sail away to foreign lands to shoot and be shot at.

“We always hoped to have a girl,” Mrs. Sutcliff continued with a teary smile. “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. We only had the two boys.”

“We had a boy named Henry,” Willa said. “But he died.”

Mrs. Sutcliff turned her head to look at Mama, her mouth a perfect O shape. “Yes,” she replied a second later. “I mean, oh. How very, very sad. I’m so sorry.”

I could tell Mrs. Sutcliff knew this about us already. Maggie had no doubt told her about Henry during one of her many visits to the Sutcliff apartment. But Mama didn’t know that Dora Sutcliff knew. It was clear to me Mama hadn’t brought it up in conversation yet with Mrs. Sutcliff, and therefore our neighbor didn’t know how to pretend she didn’t already know about Henry. She had likely already shared the tragic news with a close friend or two. Inside my head, I could hear how the conversation must have begun. “My stars! Have you heard? That sweet little family at the funeral home lost their baby boy last autumn!”

Mama pulled away a cobweb from a wispy curl at her forehead and smiled one of those thank-you smiles that said she appreciated the words of sympathy but she wasn’t going to volunteer any details. “You’re very kind. What time shall we come, Dora?”

Mrs. Sutcliff stared at Mama for a second. I think she was admiring this new neighbor of hers who had somehow survived the loss she was desperately afraid of experiencing, the death of a son. “Oh. Six.”

“Six it is,” Mama answered.

Mrs. Sutcliff seemed to need another second before she was able to tell us to come hungry because she was making lots of food. All of Jamie’s favorites.

Mama watched her through the glass panels in the front door as Mrs. Sutcliff headed down the marble stairs and back across the street. When Mama turned back around, she said she was mighty glad Uncle Fred had lots of hot water, because we’d all need to bathe for the party tonight after working to clean up the dining room.

Even though we don’t know very many people yet and the Sutcliffs don’t have girls, Maggie and I were both instantly looking forward to the farewell party. The only place we’d been to so far where we got to dress up was the big Methodist church a few blocks away on Sundays. Uncle Fred has been a member of that church since he came to the city, so naturally he wanted us to join him there. We haven’t been to a party of any kind since we left Quakertown, and that already seems like a long time ago.

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We use all of Uncle Fred’s hot water getting ready, and he complains a little about it, but we don’t care. Maggie and I put ribbons in each other’s hair and I plait Willa’s. We shine our shoes and put rose water behind our ears. Then, at a few minutes after six, we walk across the boulevard to Sutcliff Accounting and the living quarters above the shop.

We find the door to the stairs has been propped open with a chair, and there is music from a phonograph and the sound of many voices as we walk up the steps from the street entrance. When Papa knocks on the inside door at the top of the stairs, Charlie swings it open and welcomes us in.

This is my first time inside the Sutcliffs’ living quarters. The apartment is bigger than our house in Quakertown but still only half the size of the second floor of Uncle Fred’s house. It is nicely furnished, but not expensively so. I don’t think Roland Sutcliff is a rich man, but he’s been able to provide for his family. There are residents and merchants from the neighborhood whom I recognize and many other people I don’t. Roland and Dora Sutcliff see us step inside, and both of them come over to us.