…Grand's death was a great shock to me, Bertha. I didn't really believe that she could die until I read the news that she was dead. How can a person so full of life ever really be gone out of it? I still don't fully believe it—I know I won't until I come home and feel her absence.

I am so glad that she got a chance to know you. I know instinctually that she must have loved you. I had a letter from Grand herself, two days after I had the one from you telling me that she was gone. I haven't had the heart to open it yet but I don't need to—I think I know what it says.

I had a letter from Father: it appears Grand's last will and testament has been opened—to show a most unexpected thing! With the exception of a small gift to my sister Emmeline, Grand left everything she had in to me.

I had a letter from mother: her fury was barely concealed. She is livid; the only reason she 'put up' with that 'old bat' for so long was the soothing thought that she would have her hands on 'all that loot' in the end. And now she doesn't have it. And she never shall. I marched down to the PX and amended my GI will: if I am killed, Bertha, my whole fortune will pass to you. (But I shan't be killed, darling. I will come home and we will use that 'loot' to set ourselves up in style—but not too much style—just in a little farmhouse somewhere cozy.)

I have had letters from everyone and now I want one from you. You must let me know how you are liking the conservatory. Do you think that you will want to study there? It will mean giving up so much—your family, which you are so close to. I can't help but wonder: Bertha, are you going to stay in Boston?

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It was the question everyone wanted to know. Her trial period at the conservatory was coming to an end. She had stunned all of her teachers with her talent and they wanted her to enroll. They offered Bertha a formal admission, not dependent on the recommendation of Mr. McTavish, and a full scholarship. So she would not be dependent on Mr. McTavish for her tuition, either.

Everyone asked her: Bertha, are you going to stay in Boston?

I don't know, Bertha wrote to Mother, and to Dad, and to Aunts Cordy and Polly.

I don't know, she wrote to Jordan.

"I don't know," she told Mr. McTavish, and her music teachers, and Shulamite, who had taken to dropping by the house with little delicacies to tempt Bertha's appetite.

"I don't know," she murmured to herself as she lay awake under the frilled canopy of her bed in the guest room.

Oh, she liked Boston. The streets were steeped in history. Ghosts of colonial-era boys and girls peeped from around corners of old buildings. Once when Bertha had arisen in the night she had seen, standing at the foot of her bed, a fair-haired woman in a lace nightcap. The woman was carrying a long tapered candle in a hurricane glass. Bertha blinked and she was gone. She spent the rest of the night in a delicious agony of fear, gooseflesh pricking on her arms. In the morning, when she recounted the story to Mr. McTavish, he laughed.

"Why, that's great-great grandmother Arabella McTavish!" he boomed. "There's a story about her. She woke late one night to see flames from her window. She went from room to room, waking the family. In the morning, they heard all about the Boston Tea Party. Her brother Angus had been there, one of the men emptying the tea into the harbour. He never returned—those limeys had gotten him. He died a prisoner of the British. Arabella was never the same after that. I've only seen her once, when I was a mere lad. She came into my room and stood at the foot of my bed. I was a God-fearing little mite. 'Darn you, spirit, leave me now!' I cried. She smiled and did as she was bidden. I never saw her since and I've always been a little sorry—if I saw her now I'd like to get her to stay and chew the fat for a while. But she took me at my word and ain't never come back—just like a woman, to do as she's told in the most insufferable way!"

Bertha grinned; but even the story of Arabella was not enough to make her feel tied to the place.

She was making friends: Mr. McTavish, and Shulamite and Mrs. Graham, who ran the household. And friends from the music school—a girl named Joanie Parks who was studying violin and one girl with the impossible name of Scarlett Kinnicut, who played the piano. She liked them—maybe even loved them—but they did not begin to approach the feeling she had had for Dorothy, the one true girl friend of her life. But it was nice to have friends again. Bertha told them about Jordan and listened as they poured out their own troubles to her. Joanie had no boyfriend but her brother was in Italy. Scarlett had a fiancé named George Wilkes who was away in the Pacific on the Indianapolis.

"Of course, no one knows that we're engaged," she admitted. "There is some bad blood between our family and the Wilkeses—I don't know why—but we've never gotten along. My great-grandmother told me something about it before she died but I was young and I suppose I didn't listen as carefully as I should have because it didn't make much sense to me. I think it's silly to carry on such an old feud and I don't care what anyone thinks. My brother Rhett says he'd rather see me strangled than married to a Wilkes, but I will marry George when he comes home. I'll fly in the faces of all those spiteful old cats! I'll be Mrs. George Ashley Wilkes if it kills me!"

For a time Bertha had forgotten all about the war. She felt guilty over it now. It was autumn of 1943 and things were picking up on all fronts. While she had been singing trills and practicing arias, Italy had declared war on Germany. The Allies had bombed Schweinfurt, and Berlin. The U.S. had sent their Marines ashore at Bougainville and were trying desperately to capture the Island from the Japanese. Jordan was in England, training for the Allied invasion of France that Bertha doubted would ever happen. Georgie was somewhere in Europe, though Bertha had lost touch with him, and was not sure exactly where he was. Teddy was in Sicily, though. Bloody Sicily—where the little mountain paths had been stained red with blood. She thought of Teddy almost constantly, and there was a peculiar undercurrent of fear running through her life. It was as though half of her heart and soul were taken away from her—and she did not doubt that he was in perilous danger. She knew it, by the way her blood oftentimes ran cold, in the most placid of situations. She could be sitting in a classroom, studying theory, and all of a sudden she would break out in a cold sweat, her ears hearing the clang and furor of a far-off battle. That is how she knew that Teddy had had a close call.

She had letters from him, but he never let on how bad things were. Once she had a blood-spattered letter from him and he had been quick to point out that he had sliced his hand on his bayonet—a small wound, nothing to worry about. She knew that he was lying by the pain in her left shoulder that had been there all day. Teddy may have written home about his injuries to his parents, but neither her mother nor father her wrote of them to Bertha.

Only one time did Teddy write to her of Dorothy. 'Dossie would have been eighteen today,' he wrote on November twentieth—a dreary date when the rest of the world seemed focused on the invasion that was happening at Tarawa. Bertha alone knew that it held another meaning, another loss—Dorothy would have entered into her womanhood that day. Oh, how nice it would have been to stand together atop that height and look down at the world they had to conquer! But Dorothy had never left the sweet valley of girlishness. Whatever road Bertha had left to travel she must do it without Doss's help, without the balm of her comforting presence.

"Bertha?" asked Scarlett, shaking her to break her out of her reverie. "I asked you a question."

"I'm sorry, Scarlett, Joanie," said Bertha to her friends. "I was miles away. What did you want to know?"

"Are you going to stay in Boston?" Joanie and Scarlett asked in unison. Bertha groaned.

"Don't ask me that!"

She lay awake all night, tossing and turning. By morning she had made up her mind. She dressed herself with the light heart that comes after a storm of decision and made her way downstairs. "Good morning," she said presently to Mrs. Graham. "I'll take my breakfast with me if you don't mind—I'm in a bit of a hurry."

Then she noticed that Mrs. Graham's face looked gray and drawn. "What is it?" she asked. "What's wrong?"

"Mr. McTavish wants to see you in his study, dear," said Mrs. Graham. Bertha was stunned. Mrs. Graham was, as a rule, prickly. This gentle kindness was not natural to her personality.

"What is wrong?" she cried. And seeing that Mrs. Graham did not know what to say, she fled down the hallway to the study.

Mr. McTavish was waiting by the fire with his back to her. He turned and Bertha saw the telegram in his hand, read the truth in his eyes.

"Teddy," she whispered, clawing at her throat. All of her resolve from the night before had drained away in the face of this.

"Oh, Mr. McTavish!" she sobbed, "I must go home!"