Starring Adele Astaire, page 32
There were so many things I wanted. I wanted my babies back, the three I’d birthed and the one I’d barely felt before he or she was gone. I wanted my husband back. To dance or walk the grounds of our slice of heaven. To play cards or backgammon, or merely to read, as we had, before the fire on so many nights. To ride horses over the moors and cheer during a race for the champions. To go to the theatre and whisper about people at parties.
I wanted all the joy and heart that I should have had. My husband wasn’t even forty years old, and here he lay in a bed that would be his last, with Death itself clawing from underneath, biding its time for the right moment to snatch him away.
Was this how Mom felt when she’d left us in London in ’24 to go home and take care of Pop? Perhaps that was why she insisted on caring for Charlie now. Still barricading me from the realities of pain, still guarding me from all the things that she thought the world might unfairly and agonizingly wreak on me.
I swiped at the tears now, angry that I’d relinquished these few precious moments to such dark thoughts. Death was the demon that sat in the room with us, stealing our moments as much as it would steal Charlie’s breath.
“I think I should like more books,” I finally said, in answer to his query about my birthday. “I’ll never have a library like they do at Chatsworth, but I think we could have a smaller version. A collection of Brontë, Thackeray. Some Edith Wharton, Anthony Trollope. And, of course, Anita Loos.”
“I think that is perfect. Books, it is.”
“And what about you, Charlie?” I snuggled closer. “What do you want?”
“I want you to be happy.” There was a desperation in his declaration, and in that moment I felt his regret gutting me.
“I already am,” I lied, my voice cracking. “Tell me what to get you for your birthday this summer.”
“Fresh flowers, cut from the garden, and arranged all over. Especially in your hair. I always adore when you put flowers in your hair.” He touched my hair, twirling a lock around his finger. “Your first gift to me was a flower.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the tears to go away. “Was it?”
“Yes.” His voice grew wistful and took me back in time with him. “You plucked it from a vase at the Ritz in New York and said it was a piece of the city to remember you by.”
I laughed softly, afraid to jar him too much with a howl.
“I could never have forgotten you, though, darling Delly. You are the most charming woman I’ve ever met, and it has been the honor of my life to call you mine.” He drew in a ragged breath. “And when I’m gone, I want you to keep on living, darling. I want you to love again.”
My throat seized then, and I tried to swallow around the lump that wanted to come out as a wail. I wrapped my arm around his middle, wanting to mold myself against him, aware that even putting the weight of my thin arm on his belly might be too much, but, oh, how I wanted to hold him just a little while longer. To tell him there could never be another.
The following morning, Mom woke me with a shake of my shoulder. “Delly, dear,” she was saying. “Let him rest.”
I uncurled myself, trying not to notice how ragged his shallow breaths were. I followed Mom from my bedroom down to one of the many refurbished bathrooms. She handed me my toothbrush, a no-nonsense look on her face. As I brushed my teeth, she sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub, her hands folded casually in front of her.
“It’s time for you to go back to London, my dear.” Although her words came out strong, there was a brittle edge to them, and I felt almost as if she was holding her breath, bearing down for a fight.
I turned around, my toothbrush not what made me feel like gagging. “I can’t leave yet,” I argued around a mouthful of moistened tooth powder.
“Oh, don’t be so silly.” She waved away my protest, but I could see in the haunted shadows of her eyes that she did not feel as light as she tried to sound. “Charlie’s fine, and Dr. White says he could remain in his present state indefinitely. Don’t you lose any more sleep over it. Besides, your husband asked me to arrange your travel yesterday, and so you leave in a few hours.”
“A few hours?” I dropped the toothbrush and it clattered on the tile floor. I was stunned, and exasperated.
Horace and Patience started a tug-of-war with my toothbrush, which I normally would have found hilarious, but at that instant I felt as if the world were spinning too fast and I was about to be tossed off.
“Yes.” Mom handed me a towel and then wrangled the toothbrush from my dogs, rinsing it under the tap. I tried to wrap my brain around what she’d just disclosed. “Your maid is already packing your bag.”
“Mother.” I swallowed, feeling like I was being strangled. “No.” The word came out a croak.
But she didn’t hear me, or pretended I hadn’t said a word, at any rate. “It’s all settled, Delly. If you want to argue with anyone, you can argue with your husband, though I wouldn’t recommend it in his state. He wanted this. He asked for you to leave and go back to London, where you’re needed.”
I heard the words she was saying, and the ones she wasn’t.
Charlie wanted me to go. He didn’t want me here. Didn’t need me. All he wanted, needed, was for me to leave. In the last hours, days, weeks of his life, he wanted me far away.
A sharp pain stabbed within my chest. My heart was breaking.
“You promise me.” I pointed my finger at her and held her gaze so that she’d understand how serious I was. “You promise me that if anything changes you will get in touch with me right away. I want to be here when . . .” But my voice trailed off. I couldn’t even say the words. Wasn’t supposed to say them or think them or even be living them. My young, vibrant, handsome husband was dying. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I’d never even imagined this moment. Thought we had decades to go before I’d have to contemplate losing him. Wasn’t it enough that we’d lost our children? How I hated the world at that moment.
“I promise, my darling girl.” Mom’s voice grew soft as she approached me, the way it had when I was a child, missing Pop in Nebraska. She tugged me into her arms, though I resisted.
And then I couldn’t push at her anymore. My arms were weak, my body limp, and I sobbed against her shoulder as I had in childhood, desperate for solace.
* * *
March 23, 1944
Mother didn’t keep her promise.
Or maybe it was because, when I left in January, it was a shot in the dark to guess when my beloved would breathe his last. And, when it happened, it seemed to have happened quickly.
The telephone rang, and Mother’s voice sounded endlessly distant as she said, “Delly, my darling girl.” There was a beat of empty space that might as well have been a shout. “He’s gone.”
I’d not said a word, the receiver feeling as if it were a boulder in my hand, the weight of which I simply couldn’t hold. I let it drop. And then I dropped. Sinking to the floor like the flower petals we plucked in a childish game.
Charlie’s wish for his birthday came back to me then: flowers. He wanted flowers. Because he knew that by the time his birthday in August came around, he’d be long into his grave and that would be the only gift to him that I could fulfill. He’d known he was dying as he told me we had years and years to go. As he forced me away from him.
And I knew it then, as much as I knew my own grief now. I’d not wanted to be aware of what the future held. Wanted to believe what he told me. Wanted to imagine myself coming home in the spring, to a husband fully recovered.
I picked up the telephone, pressing the hard coldness of it to my ear. “Mom?”
“Oh, my darling. I’m so sorry.” Her voice was strained, as if she was holding back tears, always strong solely for me.
My lips wobbled, and I swallowed, breathing in through my nose, as I tried to find my voice. “Thank you.”
“I know I promised—”
I didn’t want her to feel any worse than she must already. “I’ll not hold you to it, Mom. There was nothing you could have done. Thank you for taking care of him. And for taking care of me.”
It was three days before I could get back to Ireland. The Allied travel restrictions were so stringent and it took pulling so many damn strings that I could have made myself into a sailboat before the wind caught. But finally I was allowed to set sail for Ireland. For Lismore. My husband. My home.
The rest was a haze. The journey. The arrival.
I viewed my husband in bed through blurred eyes, only held up by my mother’s strong arms. It looked like he was sleeping. Dressed in his nightclothes, a blanket up to his waist. His hands lay clasped over his middle as if he were simply sleeping. Hands I’d held, that had touched me, stroked my cheeks, twirled my hair, penned marvelous love letters—I wished I could have threaded my fingers with his one more time. I wished they could have been sculpted in marble so I could touch them whenever I wanted. But never would I grasp them again.
Mom led me to the drawing room and settled me in a chair.
“Charlie left you an early birthday present.”
“What?” In my confusion I stared up at her, trying to understand what the hell she was talking about. Birthday present?
My husband had just died and my birthday was six months away.
“Look around, Delly. He did this for you.”
I glanced around the drawing room for the first time, taking in the newly built floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed full of books. It was gorgeous, incredibly thoughtful. His last gift to me. All I could do was cover my eyes and sob.
Charlie’s mother didn’t make it to the funeral. Claimed it was the travel restrictions, an excuse that might have been credible, but because she’d not come to see him during his illness, nor seemed to care, I didn’t think it was. And given that Charlie hadn’t wanted his mother to help him in the first place, I chose not to dwell on it.
In a churchyard that used to be part of the castle, we laid my husband to rest. Hundreds of people followed as he was carried on the shoulders of his longest tenured employees. With the flower-laden casket, they bypassed the hearse, unable to put Charlie down, unable to let him go. None of us were ready for this.
I could barely speak, only clutch the hands of those who gave me their sympathies.
When the last of the guests had gone, I curled up on my freshly made bed, wishing they’d left it alone so there were some remnants of his scent, even as I knew whatever scent had remained wasn’t the Charlie I’d loved.
I touched his things. Found in his wallet a letter I’d written him nearly a decade ago, wrapped around the flower from the Ritz, and a picture of me, with his handwriting on the back: My darling girl.
I regretted so much the time I’d spent away, even knowing he’d bade me leave, not wanting me to see him as he got sicker and sicker.
Mother let me sulk a few days, bringing me warm milk and freshly made cookies, which I couldn’t stomach. My dogs curled up with me, offering sweet licks and nuzzles in their own comforting ways.
Then one morning Mom came into my bedroom and, in the same brisk manner she’d used when I was a child refusing to wake for my lessons, said, “Time for you to go, Delly.”
The words were an echo of her telling me to leave Lismore before.
I pushed up on my elbow, tension building between my temples. “How can you expect me to leave? I’ve just buried my husband.”
Mom walked from window to window, wrenching open the blinds. “Because, Delly, it does no good to wallow here in your misery, when you could be making other people’s lives better.”
“How can I make their lives better when all I want is to lie here and die?”
Mother gasped, whipping around, pressing her hand to her chest. The look of horror on her face almost made me take back my words. “How can you say that? I never want to hear you say that again.”
I covered my face with my hands, a fresh wave of tears free-falling. “He was my life.”
“Oh, Delly, I know it seems that way.” She came closer, sitting on the edge of the bed, her warm hand smoothing the aches from my back. “And grief has a funny way of trying to pull us under. The truth is, Charlie was only part of your life. And his passing will hurt, probably forever, but you can’t let it keep you from living for the rest.”
My mouth fell open, the tears momentarily stopped short from shock. I prepared to bellow my pain at her, my offense at how casually she tossed away his very existence, but my mother spoke before I had a chance.
“He loved you. And you loved him. Even beyond the pain of loss, the frustration of vices, you never stopped. That’s admirable. You don’t know how to do anything without doing it fiercely. Without putting everything you have behind it. And you found your match in a man who was the Charlie in your Good-Time Charlie. A man who, even at his end, wanted only your happiness. Don’t put his memory to shame by becoming a shell of the woman he loved.”
I fell back on the bed, my arms over my face as I heaved a sob.
“It’s time to go back,” Mom said again, softer this time, and I knew she was right.
I could stay here and cry for the rest of my life, or I could pick myself up and go back to work. My grief was no different from anyone else’s. The entire world was weeping for a war that seemed as if it would never end.
“Fine!” I shouted to the ceiling, letting all the pain and anger out in that one roar.
“Good.” Mom shuffled quietly from the room, but not without saying one final thing. “There’s no one in the world like you, Adele Astaire. Don’t deprive them of yourself a single second longer.”
* * *
I threw myself into work, giving the world a smiling, laughing Adele Astaire, even while on the inside I grieved. I smiled for the happy bride and groom when Charlie’s nephew Billy married Kick Kennedy in May. In June, I prayed our boys would put an end to the war when they stormed Normandy, and sobbed when so many came home broken or not at all.
I penned more letters that summer, assuring wives, mothers, sisters, grandmothers back in America that their soldier, sailor, airman was safe and well. And then, exactly a week after those brave men stormed the beaches of Normandy, Hitler retaliated.
Just before sunrise, with Horace and Patience tethered on their leashes, I walked in the dark, all of us needing the exercise and the brief moments of quiet before the day erupted in torrents of sound.
While Horace sniffed around a tree in Green Park and Patience nipped at his heels, the air-raid sirens wailed, breaking the peace of the morning. The dogs, never seeming to get used to the sound, started to bark madly, and I took off toward the hotel and an air-raid shelter.
Those who were out as early as I rushed in a panic for shelter, while those in uniform seemed to run in the opposite direction. It was damned hard to force men who were trained for war, who wanted to be out there fighting, underground to safety. They didn’t want to go down there, they wanted to climb ladders to the sky and yank the bombs from midair.
Outside the Ritz, the windows blockaded by sandbags, I could hear the distant ack-ack of the antiaircraft guns firing at top speed. But something was strange about this bombing. Something none of us could grasp. Standing outside the hotel, the sun scarcely touching the horizon, our feet rooted in place, we all tried to understand what that difference was. The usual whirring sound of dozens of Luftwaffe was instead a strange buzzing sound. Looking up into the sky, I spotted a single airplane, which didn’t look right. Its speed was faster and the body smaller, with short stubby wings compared to the usual German jets. Bright plumes of exhaust trailed behind it, making me wonder if it had been struck already by one of our own.
And then nothing. Absolute, maddening silence. The small aircraft started to plunge swiftly, menacingly, toward the city.
“My God,” I choked, recalling vaguely a conversation I’d had with Colonel Douglass the day before at the Rainbow Corner about reports of Hitler’s vengeance weapons—rockets that could be launched over the sea toward London. But that seemed like something futuristic, as silly as saying that one day we might fly aircraft up to the moon. Though it wasn’t an entirely new concept, given H. G. Wells’s destructive scenes from War of the Worlds.
Yet, unless there was a pilot flying that suicidal aircraft, it would seem that the rumors were true.
It felt like forever since a bomb had landed in London.
The eerie silence seemed endless until the small airplane disappeared. We waited, listening, until the silence was shattered by a thunderous explosion that shuddered the ground beneath our feet. A massive plume of smoke appeared in the distance, and I prayed that the aircraft had landed on an empty factory, no one yet having gone to work.
I clucked my tongue at Horace and Patience. “Come now, let’s get you back inside.” The poor doggies used to shiver at the sound of the bombs, tails tucked between their legs; now they raged at the sky, unlike the rest of us, who seemed almost immune to the noise.
Strange how, when faced with so much trauma, it feels like the norm, and the silence is the thing that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. What was coming next?
The answer to that was more of Hitler’s advanced, pilotless bombs. The devil’s goons continued to send their autopiloted missiles for months, striking without rhyme or reason. With the advances in German technology, our boys learned, too, and soon they were taking the pilotless airplanes out of the sky before they had a chance to destroy more innocent lives.
Walking through London . . . it was heartbreaking to see the changes. To stroll with my dogs past a place that I’d seen two decades before as a Bright Young Thing when hope still filled me, and find either a gaping hole in the ground or a mere shell, with the beams and cinderblock exposed. Bodies of buildings stripped bare to the skeletons. The wounded and destroyed edifices that had once made up the city that I loved.
A degree of brightness arrived in London in August, when Freddie waltzed into the Rainbow Corner as part of his USO tour for the American troops. Freddie looked thinner than usual, but so did everyone these days, with the food rations on. His uniform was crisp, and his smile a balm.
