“They belonged to Elwood and Frank’s mother. They’re Italian, I think. Frank was so fond of them.”
Eva hung a couple on the feathery tree. “Was your mother-in-law Italian?”
“No. I think she just liked pretty things.”
“Were you and your mother-in-law”—Eva cast about for the word Americans used to describe a loving relationship—“close?”
“I never got to meet her. She died before Frank and I met. The way he and Elwood talked about her, I think I would have liked her, though.”
“I am sure she would have liked you, too.”
June laughed. “Maybe. It would have been nice to have a mother in my life who was just a regular mom. I didn’t really have one of those. My mother died when I was ten and let’s just say she wasn’t your typical mother.” June laughed again, though this time less happily.
“Not…typical?”
“She was her own person, very unpredictable, I guess you could say. She didn’t treat me like my friends’ mothers treated their daughters. She’d let me stay up all night if she stayed up all night. She’d take me to the outdoor bars down at Kinney Pier or the dance hall or arcade long after dark, or she’d keep me out of school for days if she wanted to drive down to Mexico with someone she’d just met. Sometimes we had food to eat, sometimes we didn’t. Most of the time we lived in a one-room cottage in Ocean Park, but sometimes we stayed in mansions up in the hills with men who seemed to only have first names. Sometimes we slept in a neighbor’s car.”
“What happened to her?”
June paused a moment before answering. “There was a terrible flu the autumn I turned ten. Scores of people died from it that year. I don’t even know how many. My mother caught it and was gone four days later. I went to live with my grandmother and aunt in Pasadena after that.”
“I’m so sorry. You could not go live with your father?”
“I never knew my father.”
“Oh.” Eva sensed immense disappointment in those five words. She at least had her father and brother and Tante Alice when her mother died.
“My grandmother was good to me; so was my aunt, my mother’s older sister,” June continued. “But I was never sure that I truly belonged with them. They’d been at odds with my mother. It was hard for them both when she died, I know that. But they saw me as an extension of my mother and all her poor choices, I think.” June stared off into space for a moment, as if floating back to a place in her mind. “I went to secretarial school after high school. I wanted to work in the offices of a Hollywood studio because of all the movies that had kept me company on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t even care which studio. I missed my mother during the rest of my growing-up years even though I didn’t understand her. The cinema helped me imagine a different world, I guess. One without the ache of losing her.”
June brought her gaze back to the present moment and to Eva.
“My mother died when I was eight,” Eva said. “She was sick from cancer. I only have a few memories of her when she wasn’t ill. They are good memories, though. My father always talked about her like she was a gift from heaven. And my brother Arman was a little older—ten, like you—when she died. Arman remembered her far better. He would tell me things about what she was like when she didn’t have cancer, memories he would try to give me as if they could be my own.”
“What a kind thing to try to do. You must miss your father and brother.”
Eva unwrapped a glass orb striped in red and gold. “I do. I loved them both very much.”
“Did they fight in the Polish Army? Is that how they died?”
Eva sat back on her heels contemplating how best to answer that question. “No. They weren’t in the army.”
The two of them were quiet while Eva hung two more of the ornaments.
“That one is made of walrus ivory. Elwood brought it back from Alaska,” June said, nodding to a creamy white six-pointed star Eva held in her hand. “He was stationed there in the Second World War.”
This surprised Eva. “Elwood served in the last war?”
“Both he and Frank did. If you were a man between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four, you had to register for the draft. And if you were under the age of forty-four you were answerable for service. I could hardly believe it when they told me. They were forty-three in 1942, healthy and prior military. Of course the army wanted them back.”
“I would not have thought at that age…” Eva let her sentence dangle unfinished.
“I wouldn’t have, either. I hated that time when they were gone. Frank served in the Army Corps of Engineers, and he said before he left he’d just be building things, that’s all. As though he wouldn’t be in danger. But he was, nearly the whole time. And Elwood assumed he’d get a public affairs post and sit at a typewriter all day long in some war office. But he didn’t. He was assigned to Army Intelligence on the Aleutian Islands and he fought frostbite, trench foot, booby traps, and snipers while the army tried to take back the islands of Attu and Kiska from the Japanese. He could’ve easily come home in a flag-draped casket, too. It was hell knowing I could have lost them both. Absolute hell.”
This was the moment to be certain of June’s true feelings for Elwood; Eva was confident of it. But how to frame the question?
Certainly not by asking June, out of the blue, how long she’d been in love with her brother-in-law.
June would no doubt ask how Eva dared pose such a question and then show her the door.
