Evergreen by Belva Plain Page A

tonight. It’s a pity there aren’t more holidays! Decoration Day we come but it’s usually too cold to go in the water then. Look at those boys of mine, look at them splashing! They’ll get water in their ears! Maybe I’ll just duck in, too, for a minute.”
    Anna lay back. The baby moved in her, thumping weakly against her spread palms. Her body was languid from its warm burden and the warm sun. What would he be like, this child? She was so impatient to see his face. What would he be
like?
Would he live with them happily, would he love them? Sometimes, no matter what you did for them, children did not love their parents. Would he be like anyone they had known, or perhaps like someone long dead whose name they had never even heard?
    Oh, but this was a wanted baby, as much by the father as the mother! Joseph took such pride in her swelling body, the skin stretched tightly, blue-white as milk. He worried and fretted. “You don’t have to be cleaning and cooking all day. A couple of eggs for supper will be enough for me. You don’t get enough rest, you’re always running and doing something.” Then, a moment later, he would admonish, “Be sure to get out and take a long walk tomorrow, it’s very important to have exercise. That way you’ll have an easier time, Dr. Arndt says.” She had been astonished. “You spoke to the doctor?”
    “Well, I wanted to hear for myself that you were all right, so I stopped in.”
    Yes, Joseph would always take care of things. She thought of him as a builder and planner, moderate andcareful; he had come to their marriage with confidence; he would build it carefully, stone on stone, to rise and last. In him there was no betrayal. He meant what he said and he said what he meant. In him there was only trust. Lying beside him at night, she felt his sturdiness, the safety of sleeping there, the tenderness.
    And tenderness was all she wanted. The other, the force that drove him as though he would plunge in and become part of her, she did not need. She knew that he was feeling something very powerful, but she felt nothing of it herself. It was only the loving warmth that mattered. She supposed, anyway, that women never really liked anything more than that; the rest was only to satisfy a husband and to have children. Not, of course, that she had ever discussed the subject with anyone. Perhaps, if she had had a sister? But then the sister wouldn’t have known any more about it than she did.
    Once, when she had been stitching trousers at Ruth’s, Anna had overheard two of the women whispering something about being so tired at night, and how no matter how hard they worked men were never too tired. Still, it was good to know that your husband wanted you. The things he whispered at night—it was embarrassing to remember them. But men were made that way, so it must be a good thing, it must be right.
    “You look like your mother, Anna,” Ruth said. Anna opened her eyes. Ruth was standing over her, drying herself with a towel.
    “Do I?”
    “I never saw her very often, but certain things about her come to my mind. She was different from other people.”
    “How different?”
    “She didn’t talk about the things women in the villages talked about. I always thought she ought to have lived in Warsaw or maybe Vilna, where the schools are. She would have fitted there. Although she never complained, not that I remember, anyway.”
    “You don’t remember anything more?”
    “No, I was only a child myself, after all, when I left home.”
    And I remember standing in the windy burial ground thinking that I must try to hold on to their faces and voices before they should slip away. And now they have really slipped away. And there isn’t a human being on this side of the ocean who knows anything about my life up to four years ago. It is a severance, the major part of my life cut off, except in the privacy of my own mind.
    “It’s too bad when a family is split like that. You’ve no one close