Summer 1943
Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
Joséphine had learned early that a man did not have to seem loud or strong to shape an entire life.
Harry had often been no easy man. Not because he grabbed everything for himself, but because he let so much happen to him, and then again had moments when he fixed on a clear thought and pursued it without wavering. Life had driven the idealism out of him early. Too much had proved ugly, wrong or unalterable, and some things he accepted not out of weakness, but because he no longer believed everything could be set right.
She had loved him all the same. Not cautiously, not half-heartedly, but wholly.
From that love only William had remained, her son, her only boy, the one thing that in the end had been clear and good.
Later Harry was dead, and with him not merely a man had vanished, but an entire world of possibilities and hopes. Joséphine had learned to live with that. For a long time, it was enough.
Then Edmond came.
With Edmond, everything was different. No storm, no fire, no tear in the air when he entered a room. Instead, calm. Normality. He was not a man one could romanticise, but one one could live with, and perhaps that was worth more. He treated her well, took William in decently and never acted as though he had to erase the dead man in order to make room for himself.
Early on she had known Edmond would never be able to have children. At the time she had accepted it. She had her son. He was still small, needed her, filled the house, the days, the future. That had been enough. Only when the years grew quieter and William outgrew childhood did the wish sometimes return. A second child. Small footsteps in the house once more. Another head on her lap, smelling of soap and sleep. It was not to be.
Even so, they had a good life. In some years, a very good one. When the crisis came and other families had to eat less, sell their things and bury their hopes, life with them remained bearable. Not lavish, but secure. Edmond understood money, investments, patience, and the fact that in hard times one did not panic. Joséphine was grateful for that. While elsewhere mothers sewed, mended, stretched and lied so their children would not fully grasp the hardship, she could keep her son well fed. She could buy him good shoes, shirts, cook proper meals for him. William grew tall, healthy and strong. A boy who filled every doorway before he was a man.
The older he grew, the more often she saw in him not only Harry, but James as well. Something in the shoulders, something in the look, something in that quiet, masculine self-possession that either reassured or intimidated people. She liked it. And it frightened her. Men like that attracted paths no mother would choose for her son.
When West Point came, she had been proud as only a mother can be. She told everyone who was too slow to escape her. Her son at West Point. Her William. It had been a fine, bright kind of pride, one that tasted of the future. He would become an officer, perhaps an engineer, perhaps something grand and clean, with rank, with brains, with a desk instead of mud on his boots.
Then Pearl Harbor came.
From then on, West Point was no longer only honour. It was a prelude.
At first she had still clung to the things sensible people clung to. Perhaps the war would end quickly. Perhaps boys like William would never truly be needed. Perhaps he would get a post where he read tables, counted matériel, supervised machines instead of being shot somewhere in Europe or the Pacific. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
With every month, those perhapses grew weaker.
Sometimes her fear was so bad that prayer was no longer enough. Then she sat with folded hands in the kitchen or the bedroom, feeling her heart beat too hard, too fast, and had the sense that she could no longer draw breath. Twice Edmond had had to drive her to the doctor because she became dizzy and believed she would die there in the waiting room. The doctor spoke of nerves, rest and avoiding agitation. As though a mother could simply empty her head because a man in a white coat recommended it.
To lose a man was one thing.
To lose her son, her only child, was another.
In those months her thoughts reached for anything that promised support. Again and again Shirley Ann came to mind. A proper girl. Not some fast little thing, not a silly goose, not a girl with eyes only for uniforms or a motorcar. A decent young woman from a sensible family. Joséphine knew her mother. One saw each other in church, spoke politely and knew enough about one another not to have to worry.
Perhaps, she thought, William would see her again during the holidays.
Perhaps one summer would be enough, a few afternoons together, a little closeness returning at the right time. Perhaps something would come of it before he had to leave. A wife to come home to. A reason not to get involved in every piece of foolishness young men in wartime took for glory. Perhaps even a grandchild. Something that remained. Something that held when everything else fell away.
It was not a beautiful thought, almost wanting to push a son into a future in that way. But beautiful thoughts had long since stopped helping her. She needed useful ones.
When William came home in the summer of 1943, she knew at once that this might be the last time she saw him like this. Not dead, not wounded, not changed by things no one ever truly gets rid of again, but simply as her son. Tall, strong, handsome, with the hunger of a young man and the look of someone who was already living half outside his parents’ house. When she embraced him, for a moment there was nothing but gratitude. He was there. Warm, solid, alive.
She cooked too much, as always. Watched him eat. Listened to what he said and what he left unsaid. She was not stupid. She knew West Point had changed him. But as long as he sat at her table, as long as he drank tea and broke bread and half argued back with his mouth full, some remnant of childhood remained, and that was something she laid claim to.
When he went to help the Landrys, at first she thought it would be over after a day or two. Paint a room, carry a few boxes, a little neighbourly help before he turned back to more important things. That was all very well, but when one or two days became three and more, she wanted to put an end to it. She did not want him spending his holidays as a house painter. She wanted him in the house, wanted to take him shopping, talk with him and Edmond, perhaps bring Shirley Ann into things if the moment arose. Not have him disappear all day into a neighbouring house, sweating away.
After a few days she decided to fetch him.
She would go shopping with him. Or at least draw him out of that work. She went over, already half forming in her mind what she would say. Something motherly, firm, something a son could not easily resist without seeming ill-mannered.
As she came nearer the house, the first thing she noticed was what she did not hear.
No scraping. No calling. No bucket. No brush. No chair legs. None of the sounds renovation brought with it.
Instead, something else.
At first muffled. Then clearer. A rhythm one could not mistake if one had lived long enough.
Joséphine stopped.
Through the window, through a gap in the curtain, she saw something. Skin. Bodies. Movement.
For one moment she did not know what she ought to do. Blush, laugh, cross herself, hammer at the door, call Suzanne Landry by name or drag her son out of the house by the ear like a boy caught stealing in church. All of it was there at once. Outrage, embarrassment, anger and, somewhere, very inappropriately, an almost hysterical urge to laugh.
She did not go to the door.
Nor did she knock on the window.
She only stood there for a moment, hand on her skirt, listened once more and understood everything. It was not the painting that was taking so long. Not the boxes. Not the paint drying so slowly. Her son was lying with the neighbour, and the neighbour was making him sweat, though certainly not at work.
Then she turned round and went back.
He was young, she thought. Let him have his pleasure.
So long as he did nothing foolish.
Or rather: let him do something foolish and not go to war.
Anything, only not the war.
The thought came so clearly, so raw, that it startled even her. Better an affair with a married neighbour, better sin, shame and gossip, better a disorderly summer than a clean, proud death in uniform. If God had granted her a wish, it would not have been virtue. Not any more. Only life.
When she was home again, she tied on her apron and put a pot on the stove. She would cook him something good. After so much effort, she thought, and in spite of everything had to laugh. Her son and the neighbour. Well then. If the world was losing its mind, one single summer was hardly going to change the beat.
Later, when William came home, she only looked at him briefly, and it was enough. Something in his face was lighter, more self-satisfied, softer and at the same time full of strength. He said little. She said little too. But now she knew why the painting was taking so long.
She disapproved of it.
Of course she disapproved of it.
Suzanne was married. Suzanne was her friend. Suzanne was old enough to know better, and brazen enough to do it anyway. If Joséphine was honest, what displeased her almost more was how easily the woman had taken what she wanted. But displeasure was one thing. What mattered was another.
What mattered more was that William was alive, laughed, ate and was not making his way to his end on some train full of recruits. What mattered more was that the summer still bound him to things a man is reluctant to leave. Skin. Pleasure. Closeness. Perhaps that too was a kind of hope.
Gradually she changed her behaviour. She no longer spoke about the Landrys. She no longer fetched him out of the neighbouring house. Instead she took him shopping more often, gave him a small cross, laughed more often as though everything were normal. Not because she had been blind, but because she had decided what she would know and what she would tolerate.
When one day, after too much red wine, she challenged him about it, only halfway, only tentatively, and he calmly told her that perhaps one day he would paint other rooms, perhaps for his own family, she looked at him and knew he was no longer a boy. She drew back, not out of weakness, but because she understood that her power had diminished. One could not hold a man fast as one held a child. One could only hope that something would remain with him.
He left again. The summer closed behind him. And with it her hopes for Shirley Ann grew weaker too. Shirley had been the neat idea. The orderly one. The one a mother could have spoken of without shame. Suzanne was something else. A woman with hunger, loneliness and very earthly solutions. Joséphine did not like that. But her dislike changed nothing of what had been.
Months later the news came.
Suzanne was pregnant.
When Joséphine heard it, she was silent for a while. Her first reaction was not happiness. Nor pride. It was something sharp. An inward flinch, as though someone had opened a door without invitation that ought to have remained shut. She did not like it. Not at all. That the woman had taken her son as though he were a strong young stallion led out to the paddock at the proper time. That she got what she wanted. That something lasting should now come of all this of all things.
And yet.
When she was alone, she thought about it for a long time.
William was away. The war would take whom it wished. Perhaps he would come back safe, perhaps changed, perhaps not at all. No one could know. But now there was something that remained of him. Something of his blood, his summer, his youth. Whatever stood on paper. Whatever neighbours said or husbands believed or priests thought of it.
Paper was paper.
Blood was blood.
She would not let that be taken from her.
If a child came of this summer, then it was not only Suzanne’s child. It was William’s. And if the world was mad enough to devour boys, then a mother might at least hold fast to the fact that something of her son would endure.
She told no one so.
Not Edmond. Not the neighbours. Not even herself aloud.
But from then on, whenever she thought of the war, of uniforms, of trains, of letters and the long fear between one sign of life and the next, there was now something else among it all. Not only fear of loss. Also the bitter, secret comfort that perhaps something of William was already in this world and would remain.
And if God was just, she thought in one of those quiet moments when prayer seemed possible again, then he would not first take everything from her and then demand that she smile decently while he did it.