And she knew this moment would be captured for her forever, encased in a permanent indestructible bubble of time, the sound of the bugle echoing on the still and silent air, the thin sheen of perspiration on the young girl’s lip, her head bent in rapt silence as she listened, and her slender hand coming up casually, unconsciously, in a gesture that seemed so very familiar to Julia, a gesture that somehow recalled for her in a sweet rush of painful memory her youth, her youth, and she watched the girl Gillian until the moment was gone and there remained on the rock with its historic plaque only the thirty-nine-year-old woman named Julia Regan whose life had been secret after secret after secret in the golden sunshine, and then the echo died.
Oh, the summer went by somehow. Somehow the summer went by as all summers do, in fat and lazy reticence. Although they were dying on the beaches in the Pacific and there was sugar and gasoline rationing and it was difficult to get new tires for old cars, the summer of 1943 went by. Summer storms came and went with sudden fury, and people read the newspapers anxiously to see how our boys were doing, and there was a change in the physical face of America, uniforms everywhere. In Norfolk, Virginia, it was difficult to see anything but white hats bobbing down the main street on any afternoon after three-thirty, and the Army Air Corps took over a great many Miami Beach hotels, and 4-F became an expression that could cause fist fights in bars. But somehow the summer went by, and somehow there were still relics of peace, and somehow the war seemed very distant.
On the beaches of America, the record players spun all the popular songs, “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me,” and “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” and “Mairzy Doats,” and kids lay on the sand in sun-tanned splendor, clean young bodies and clean white teeth and straight legs, and hummed to the whirl of the records and twisted straws in empty Coca-Cola bottles and listened to the distant rush of water against sand, and the war was very far away. Somehow the amusement parks managed to keep their Ferris wheels spinning, and there was black-market gas to be had, and butchers got richer and fatter selling black-market meat to favored customers. Every now and then, someone was startled to see a gold star in the window of a neighbor, or shocked to learn that an American transport had gone down with all hands and the son of a neighbor or relative was aboard. But the church socials went on, and the dancing continued, and girls and boys alike wore their hair in pompadours, and the Windsor knot came into popularity, and skirts were shorter, and perhaps morals were too, some of the war wives were whooping it up in a fling at second childhood with the teen-agers whose attitude was Kiss Me My Sweet, and a burlesque revue assembled by Mike Todd and called Star and Garter was still knocking them dead on Broadway. Somehow the summer went. War wasn’t all that much hell after all. War to Americans, in fact, war to the Americans at home — who waited for letters scrawled from muddy Sicilian ditches by men who crawled with lice, by men who huddled together while Stuka bombers screeched out of the sky and tanks loomed on the horizon — was kind of exciting.
There were motion pictures like The Watch on the Rhine, which made everybody hate those dirty Nazi bastards, and This Is the Army, which made everybody love our patriotic boys, and Casablanca, which made everybody love a song called “As Time Goes By,” and people were watching time go by, laughing it up and drinking it up and loving it up, strange girls in strange towns met strange soldiers, and generally everything was a little looser and a little more frantic. War in fact, well war, to get right down to rock bottom, to get right down to the core of human reaction, to get right down under all that patriotic folderol and all that war-is-indecent and inglorious and disgusting, and nobody wants all this senseless maiming and killing, war when all was said and done was downright fun.
And somehow the summer went by.
“She’s screaming again,” Penny said. “I can’t stand her when she screams.”
The baby’s cries came from the open second-story window of the frame house in Otter Falls. Penny, sitting with her mother and her sister, put her hands over her ears and said, “Mother, make her stop.”
“It won’t hurt her to cry a bit,” Priscilla Soames said. “She has to learn sooner or later that she won’t be picked up every time she—”
“Mother, make her stop!” Penny said sharply, and Amanda, sitting on the porch steps, turned to look up at her sister.
“I’ll go,” she said.
“No!” Priscilla said. “Stay where you are, Amanda.”
“Why does she have to cry?” Penny asked, and Amanda continued to stare at her, and she suddenly wondered when Penny had stopped being her sister, when she had become only a somewhat thin and gaunt stranger who complained about her baby constantly, who never confided in Amanda at all any more, who seemed to roam the old wooden house in a silent angry world of her own. “What right does she have to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. I’m the one!”
“Penny...”
“Make her stop, Mother.”
“Penny, if you’d just—”
“I’m leaving. I’m going to town. I can’t sit here and listen to her scream all day long.”
“Penny, I’ll pick her up,” Amanda said gently, and she rose from where she was sitting, and again Priscilla said sharply, “Stay where you are, Amanda!”
Amanda sat and looked up toward the second-story window. Penny rose swiftly and slapped her own thigh, a curious gesture that seemed to start as a simple flattening of her skirt, but which became exaggerated in the execution, ending as a vicious slap that sounded flat and hard on the summer air. In the church, Amanda’s father began playing the organ, and Amanda became aware of the clicking of her mother’s knitting needles, like a meticulous metronome beating out a steady rhythm for the organ notes that floated fat and round across the lawn and the high shrill cries of the baby upstairs.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Penny said, and she bounded down the steps, and Amanda watched her walk purposefully across the lawn and into the garage. She heard the old Chevy starting and then saw Penny back the car out of the garage and down the driveway, her long blond hair streaming over her shoulders. The car pulled away from the house. The sound of its engine faded, leaving only the sounds of Kate, and the organ, and the knitting needles clicking. And then the baby fell silent, whimpering herself into stillness. The organ notes rolled from the church. The knitting needles continued their steady subdued clatter. Priscilla Soames rocked herself back and forth in the rocker, and Amanda sat on the porch steps, her hands clasped around one knee.
Priscilla did not look at the needles or the brown sweater she was knitting for the Red Cross. She looked out over the lawn instead, and at the blue jays that darted in the branches of the old maple. When Amanda recalled the scene later, she would remember that her mother’s face had remained expressionless throughout the entire discussion, and then she tried to remember when she had ever seen any expression on her mother’s face, and she could not remember a single time. The face was always placid, always in strong repose. She wondered once — many years later when she was already married — whether her mother’s face remained calm and expressionless even in orgasm, and then of course she wondered whether her mother had ever experienced orgasm, and then she realized this was all part of the unconscious resentment she had nurtured that day on the porch in Otter Falls, the knitting needles clicking, the organ notes trembling over the grass.