Evergreen by Belva Plain

serious way she talked about things. A girl from a village in Poland, and she knew about painters in Paris and writers in England and musicians in Germany! How did she keep it all in that proud, bright head! Oh, Pa would have been pleased with her! He smiled. Pa wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what she was talking about, he would have known less than I, and that’s little enough. But he would have known quality when he saw it.
    Again she stirred in the bed beside him and murmured something in her sleep. He wondered what she might be dreaming, and hoped it was no pain or sorrow. He knew so little about her. Lying there in the dark, he thought how separate they were after all: is it always so? Oh, surely not! Surely if she needed him as he did her they would come together.… He knew that her need, her love, were not like his. But they had been married so short a time, only a few months. He could be patient. They would have a child and that itself would draw them nearer. Yes, they would have a child: perhaps one was already on the way? In the powerful surge and release when they came together surely there was the creation of a child? Such feelings must result in something; wasn’t that what life was all about?
    His body began to grow light under the covers. His mind began to blur. He thought: now, now I’m falling asleep. Keen thought lost its edge; his mind began to float in a lustrous mist, a wash of shifting shapes and color, red ovoids, lavender spirals, columns of cream and silver rising like smoke. Then a curtain fell, dark foliage of dreams, and through the dusky green a spray of gilded dots, confetti dots. No, coins they were, golden coins, and when he reached out his hand they fell through his fingers and into his palm: not hard, not metal at all, but soft like rain, a soft, protecting rain to wash over Anna and his mother and his father. No, no, he thought, it is too late for my father and soon will be too late for my mother. But for Anna, over Anna, the warm and lovely golden rain must fall.
    By midnight he was asleep.

10

    They stood modestly back to back in the women’s bathhouse until their bathing suits were on, black taffeta skirts, black stockings, slippers and straw bonnet tied under the chin so the breeze couldn’t blow it away. Anna had never worn a bathing suit before; her legs, except for the stockings, were uncovered to the knees and she felt ashamed to go out in public like that. But she would not have admitted it to Ruth, who had been often at the beach and was very sure of herself.
    “See, I told you the suit would look fine!” Ruth said. “You don’t show at all, and the baby due so soon! As for me, I always look like an elephant when I’m expecting. Come, well find a good spot before the crowds arrive, that’s the best thing about getting here early,” she went on, as they lifted their feet through the heavy sand.
    Solly and Joseph had already spread the blankets. Harry and Irving, big boys of nine and ten, knobby like their father in maroon striped suits, were already in the water. The little girls had shovels and pails.
    “Ah, there you are!” Joseph cried. His expression, that no one else would have noticed, told Anna that she looked very fine. In these few months they had already got a kind of secret “married” language; she had thought it would take longer for a man and woman to do that.
    “Now I can really see the ocean!” she said. “It was differentwhen we crossed over, so dark and angry, it seemed.”
    Here the sea was mild and lovely, the surf breaking in rows of ruffled white and sighing softly out again.
    “We’ll be going in for a while,” Solly announced.
    “Let me go too!” Anna cried.
    Joseph frowned. “No, no. God forbid that you should fall! Next year I’ll bring you, I promise I will.”
    The blankets had been spread next to a breakwater. Ruth propped herself against a rock and put the lunch basket in its shade. “Wait till you see the fireworks