Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes Page B

met her the summer before her junior year at Wellesley. He had just graduated from Yale, and for one long June weekend, they were both on Cape Cod.
    He had noticed her sunning herself on a small raft, dipping her hand in the water every so often to moisten her slender arms. She seemed at first to be with a group of friends, but had floated off on her own, and when she realized how far out she was, slipped off her raft and began swimming somewhat urgently toward the shore. Finally wrestling her raft to the sand, she stood dripping before him, shaking water from her ears. She had a swanlike neck, a delicate and pointed chin, flirtatious lips.
    “That was some situation out there,” Gavin said.
    She thumbed her red gingham swimsuit off her thigh and something plopped onto the sand. “Ick, jellyfish.”
    “Can’t blame them for wanting to get close to you,” he said.
    “Well, look at you, standing there all amused. What would you have done if I were drowning?”
    “Give you the kiss of life.”
    “Don’t you wish, Mr. Shy.”
    She was a girl who turned heads, and knew it. Her mother, Yvette, kept her on a tight leash. Gavin couldn’t take Eleanor out for dinner without first having a glass of apple juice in Yvette’s living room and discussing the works of Tolstoy, or Sigmund Freud. Yvette hadn’t gone to college, but she loved “talking to big men about big ideas.” “And you, mister,” she always said to Gavin, “are going places.” Yvette had met Eleanor’sfather at age sixteen when he helped liberate her small village of Gravelotte. She’d been in the United States long enough to shed her accent and all evidence of her Frenchness. Yvette—which she pronounced I-vet —was more American than Betsy Ross. On the Fourth of July, Yvette cooked them a five-course meal, pinned small flags on their lapels, and set off her own backyard fireworks.
    The Irish-American father was long dead by then, and not much spoken of. When Gavin asked what he died of, Eleanor looked off and said, “Liver trouble.”
    There had been a sister, too. Simone. A year younger than Eleanor. She had died of polio. Yvette and Eleanor never spoke of her, except once a year on August fifth when they quietly celebrated her birthday. As an adult, long after her mother had died, on that date Eleanor would sit alone in the kitchen at night and blow out three candles on a cupcake.
    Yvette was an anxious mother. She wanted to know exactly where Gavin and Eleanor were going, when they’d be back, that they would wear seat belts and stay below the speed limit, that they’d avoid Boston’s bad neighborhoods, that they wouldn’t fool around with marijuana. Gavin thought it stemmed from the pain of losing her other daughter. Or her childhood under Nazi occupation. Eleanor shrugged off her mother’s worries, inventing elaborate stories about puppet shows and choral groups they had seen to cover for the hours they spent making out in Gavin’s red Chevrolet.
    A month before Gavin shipped off, Eleanor took the bus to Fort Benning to see him. Yvette came as well, nervous about Eleanor traveling, but kept herself tucked away in the Farewell Motel. Eleanor wore a red seersucker dress and yellow high heels and looked so pretty Gavin felt as if he were seeing her for the first time. She had brought scissors and cut off a lock of her hair and tied it with a ribbon.
    “Keep this in your pocket all the time. Over your heart. And keep these under your pillow.”
    From her purse she removed a pair of panties: pale pink with small white flowers and lace trim. She twirled them around with her fingertip, giggling, a blush creeping across her face, before flinging them at his face.
    “You’re killing me, Ellie.”
    “Promise me no matter how long they keep you there, you’re mine.”
    “How about I promise in front of a judge?”
    His father, his training captain—they both advised him to get hitched. The war could be long, and a wife might be the only