Chapter 2:
When Alice had been back at Ingleside for a week, it was as
though she had never been away. The household adjusted itself to her rhythms
gratefully – things had a tendency to seem stale and a bit lackluster whenever
she was away. Every morning she rose early and donned a crisp white shirt and
the trousers that made her grandfather look slightly disapprovingly at her,
tucked her blueprint case under her arm, and set off for White Sands in the
little red coupe that had been a graduation present to herself. Every evening,
she came home full of stories about the building site, the work going on at the
new hotel, the plans she had for the cunning little series of windows in the
main dining room, each shaped like a sand-dollar, with grilles forming the
star-shaped pattern in the middle. She sang while she set the table for supper,
and after the dishes had been cleared and were drying on the drainboard, she
joined her grandparents on the verandah. Once these evenings had been devoted
to friendly gossip, but now the radio, pulled up to the window, captivated them
all with war news.
Alice hugged her slim knees to her chest and listened to the
wash of familiar names and places of her youth – mourned the fates of the
cities she had visited with her grandfather – felt the torment in the land of
her birth and childhood. She thought often of her parents those nights, as she
heard fragments of angry speeches in German and remembered half-forgotten words
and phrases in her native tongue. It was strange to think that without the
first war, she herself would never have come to exist. What monumental changes
would be brought into her life if it all happened over again?
Just as his mother had predicted, Gilbert Ford went overseas
in August. The clan had a send-off for him in Rainbow Valley on the night
before he left. Rilla Ford bore the parting bravely, but after the train had
turned the bend and disappeared from sight of the Glen St. Mary station, she
crumpled into a little heap against her husband’s chest. Back at the House of
Dreams, she took to her bed, wan and white with the strain of it all, and did
not leave it for many days.
Alice went up to visit her one perfect afternoon – so
perfect that it’s perfection hurt. She was shocked to find her young, girlish
aunt looking suddenly gaunt and old. Rilla sat up from her pillows to clasp
Alice’s callused and ink-stained hand with her own elegantly manicured one.
There was a desperate sort of fever in her eyes.
“Joy – you can tell me if he’ll come back – can’t you? You
have – presentiments – as Walter did. I know
you do. Can’t you look – look somehow – and tell me: Will my boy come back to
me?”
Alice squeezed her cold fingertips, her heart breaking. “Oh,
Aunt Rilla – it doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid. I wish it did – but it
doesn’t. And besides – I haven’t had a ‘vision’ in years. I think I’ve grown
out of the habit of it. But I know Gilbert will come back – I know he’ll be
fine – I know it, deep in my heart.”
Rilla looked at the face of the girl who was her beloved
Walter’s daughter. Walter – Walter! What his loss had done to her – done to
them all! And how his eyes were pleading with her in Alice’s face. Would she
forget the old vow she had made in Rainbow Valley, all those years ago? With a
great effort, she regained a little of her composure and squeezed Alice’s hand
back – weakly – but it was all the strength she could manage in the moment.
“Yes,” she said, making an effort to keep her voice even
around the lump in her throat. “I’m being quite silly. Of course – of course
you can’t know. None of us can. We can only try to ‘keep the faith’ to the best
of our abilities. I’m sorry, Alice, darling. You are – a dear – to come and sit
with me. It helps – it helps more than you’d think.”
Something else that helped was Jims Anderson’s presence at
the House of Dreams. His trial over, he had taken a leave of absence from his
firm, and come to spend a whole three weeks with his ‘Mother Rilla.’ In town,
he might be James K. Anderson, rising star of one of the province’s premier law
firms – but in the Glen he was again the country boy he had been in his youth.
He laid off his tailored suits for swim trunks, and within days, his skin was
tanned, and his golden hair was lightened by the sun. His movements seemed
loose and easy and his laugh was infectious. Slowly but surely, the tight lines
of worry around Rilla’s dented-lipped mouth began to ease away.
Alice was also glad for his presence. It was sweet to be
back home, but she had been feeling on the verge of loneliness until Jims
arrived. Aunt Di and Uncle Paul and Charlie were still in Boston – Walt was
away at an artist’s colony for a month. When he was home, there was a shield of
pensiveness around him that Alice knew she must not try to penetrate. Cissy was
doing a course in emergency nursing at the hospital in Bright River, and they
worked her so hard when she was there that on the weekends she was a yawning
mess, when she wasn’t curled up somewhere, catching up on sleep. With Jims
around, the pale blue that had threatened to envelope Alice dissipated
entirely. A crack opened and widened, and sunlight poured in.
He and Alice took long rambles in the evenings after she
returned from White Sands for the day. In matching dungarees, they would pack a
hamper with a supper of sandwiches and lemonade and grab their fishing poles,
and cycle to the Glen Pond. Or they would hike to the top of the Harbor Light
and watch the sun dip down into the Gulf. Or else wend their way down Rainbow
Valley, and spend the gloaming hour sprawled in the whispering caraway at the
Old Bailey House, talking, as the last of the day glinted off of the old
wavery-glassed windows.
And in those times together, there might not be a war at
all. For they never talked of it, Alice and Jims. There was enough of that in the
other hours of the day. Instead, they discussed books – and music – and films,
and which were their favorites. Jims had seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington five times, and enjoyed it more and
more each time. Alice was addicted to the Thin
Man movies, and especially admired the snappy Myrna Loy. Jims had not seen Another Thin Man yet – and so one night
they drove into the Glen in Alice’s coupe, with the top down, and saw it at
Flagg’s cinema.
Jims told her tidbits about the cases he was working on, and
Alice listened eagerly. When he spoke of his work, his brown eyes grew large
and his voice impassioned, and Alice knew that the war-baby of years past had
finally ‘made something’ of himself, as he always vowed he would. When Jims had
talked himself out, Alice told him of the plans for the new hotel – and the
plans she had for it, if only she was
allowed to make all of the decisions herself.
“A hotel should feel homey – not cold and impersonal. How
much you enjoy a place is just as much a function of how you feel when you’re there as what you do when you’re there. I’d like to put in
a lot of nooks and crannies – little window seats and alcoves, stocked with
books and cushions, where you can lose yourself in an hour of looking out at
the sea. But the owners want it as grand as they can get it – marble this and
gold-plated that. Ah, well!”
“You should build your own hotel, someday,” Jims said,
stretching his long legs out in front of him and leaning back against the
Bailey House stoop to look up at the violet-colored clouds scuttling by overhead.
“I think this might be my last one,” Alice admitted. “You
see – a hotel isn’t a home, Jims, no matter how homey it might be. I’d much
rather put my efforts into designing a place that will hold memories – not
transient ones, but a lifetime’s worth. Perhaps when this project is over, I’ll
seek one out.”
“I’d like to have you design a house for me, someday,” Jims
said. “I never had one of my own, and I’d like to. I lived at Ingleside on
charity – they loved me, yes, but it was charity all the same. And dad’s
cottage was never a home for me. Though I love the House of Dreams, it will
never be mine, not the way it is Gil’s and Jack’s and Oliver’s.” His strong
voice betrayed him a bit when he finished, “I’d like to have a home of my own –
someday.”
Alice covered his brown paw with her slim hand. “I will
build you a grand home, someday, Jims – and then I’ll build myself one, exactly
one smidge grander.”
Jims grinned and reached over to yank her pony-tail – and
let his hand linger on the small of her back for just a moment longer.
And so in this way, the summer passed away into fall.
____________
In September, Persis Ford married Shirley Blythe in the
garden of the House of Dreams, where her parents had plighted their troth
almost fifty years before. The whole thing was gotten together rather quickly
(before Persis had a chance to change her mind, Aunt Di said, a bit cuttingly),
but the general air of thought regarding the marriage was that it had been a
long time coming.
Alice and Cissy were Persis’ bridesmaids, but instead of
wearing matching colors, Persis insisted they pick their own gowns. She had the
foresight to know that this might be the last new dress the girls’ had for the
duration of the war, and wanted them to have something of their choosing. So it
came to pass that Cissy outfitted herself in pale blue crepe, and Alice
accentuated her dark beauty with a forest green rayon sheath that hugged her
curves in a most alluring way. There was a bit of a murmur over her choice –
green was an unlucky color for a wedding and luck was at a premium these days –
but once the folks actually saw Alice
in her dress, the protests fell away.
“Can that be our Alice?” wondered Uncle Jem, as he watched
her turn this way and that as Aunt Una pinned her hem before the Ingleside
hearth. “That movie star, there? I’d better put myself on detail during the
wedding fete, Faith – she’ll be fighting the boys off with a stick in that.”
For her part, Alice was not so sure. “This is my ‘three
times a bridesmaid,’” she confessed to Cissy, laughingly, as they worked on
mixing ingredients for the wedding cake in the Ingleside kitchen. “There was
Aunt Di’s wedding – and Katy Murray’s, last summer – and you know the old
saying as well as I do. But I promised Aunt Persis way back when that I’d stand
up for her if she ever made up her mind to marry Uncle Shirley, and I must keep
my word, even if it means dooming myself to old maidenhood.”
The wedding went off without a hitch – Shirley Blythe looked
like to burst from pride as the fair Persis promised to ‘love and honor and
obey’ – “but never, ever milk a cow!”— and the party in the garden after the
ceremony was scented with the spice of red roses in the bouquet that little
roly-poly Rosie Blythe plucked from the air after Aunt Persis (now in her dove
gray traveling suit) tossed up on her way to the car that would take the
newlyweds back to Avonlea and Green Gables. Alice had not even tried to join
the throng to catch it. Instead she hung back by the fence, and watched the
festivities half-hidden in the gloom of a copse of spruce, a little smile just
touching her lips.
Jims Anderson found her there – stood for a moment out of
sight, and watched her. In her green dress and with her dark hair, she blended
with the trees – only the long line of her arms and throat showed white, and
her shining pale face above that. Without quite knowing what he would do before
he did it, he crossed to her, and found the curve of her hip with his hand. And
then, drawing her close, he kissed her. Not at all to his surprise, he found
Alice kissing him back.
She drew away from him and said, laughingly, “That wasn’t moonlight.” Her eyes were
twin stars above her shy red mouth.
Jims kissed her again, and Alice threw her hands behind his
head to pull him close –hands that were holding her own bouquet, made up of
sweet new roses of the palest pink – love hopeful, and expectant.
