Thursday, May 20th, 1943
11:45 a.m.
Therese loved the silence of a museum. She loved how the space could be crowded with a hundred people and - if they happened to be all grown-ups, that was - be completely silent as everyone was absorbed with looking at the pictures hanging on the walls or the statues strategically standing in the middle of a room. She blended in with the other children, dressed in the same little jumper and blouse as the other girls. She dragged her feet across the hardwood, trudging along after her classmates who were busy pushing and shoving each other in order to get close to the artworks. Naturally, the bigger, taller children had worked their ways to the front would the smaller children, like Therese, were stuck in the back.
She didn't make the same amount of noise as the other children as she moved from place to place. No one could possibly suspect her walking up behind them and standing there with her notebook in one hand and her Brownie camera in the other. Even with the camera in her hand, no one thought Therese was taking their photo. No one ever begged her to have their photo taken. Her classmates knew that she only ever took photos of boring things, like the way the shadows crept into a room or how sunlight reflected in glass, and scoffed at how she could waste those precious sixteen exposures on such seemingly boring topics.
Sister Alicia never thought they were boring, then again, she always asked Therese to take photos of her and the other staff and faculty at St. Margaret's. Sometimes, whenever there was a problem with a ceiling leak or something was destroyed during a storm, Sister Alicia would rush to find Therese, who somehow was the only person at the school with a camera, and ask her to capture images of the damage. Therese liked how useful she could be, even if it was just to get a picture of stained carpeting or a downed branch that wrecked a window. Water always caused interestingly destructive swirls in fabric, broken glass always made the most impressive sharp points she could never go near. There was an odd beauty in the destruction of nature that she liked to capture with that little camera.
Therese loved her camera. It might not have been a shiny, fancy, and new like those Leica imports, but it had character and it was clear that the camera had been well-used and well-loved by its previous owner. The original handle on it was broken and Therese had to use a piece of string around the two metal knobs at the top to form a convenient way to carry it. She added two pieces of string to the top: a short one so she could carry it or pick it up with one hand, and then a long string so she could carry the camera around her neck in case her hands were full. There was also a dent in one of the corners where it looked as though it had taken quite a tumble at one point. The dent also masked what looked like a few initials that had been carved into the bottom; Therese was only ever able to make out the letter R.
11:45 a.m.
After Easter, Elaine went out to Washington to visit her father and Margie. Ever since Margie had left St. Margaret's a couple years earlier, Elaine had been making a point of visiting her father and her at least once a year, always on her own without any of the boys. No one in the family knew that Elaine's baby girl head grown up just down the road from the house, no one except their mother, who had apparently taken that fact to her grave. Everyone thought little Margie been given up for adoption when all that time, she was only down the road from them. It wasn't until the funding she had provided ran out (or so they said) almost eight years later that the school came calling, asking what to do.
That's when everyone found out.
That's when they decided it was best for Margie to go live with her grandfather, who was more than happy to have the chance to raise another daughter, this time with his new wife. Or maybe it was just girlfriend. Her status was unclear; regardless, she never came back East whenever Carol's father visited and she always seemed to make herself scarce whenever Carol was around. Elaine had met her on each of her visits, but she never pried and he never offered. Perfectly typical of their family, Carol told herself. As for Margie, all Elaine would say was that she sure as hell reminded her of Carol at thirteen, never elaborating any further as to what that meant.
The two oldest boys were in school in Massachusetts, leaving Jack, not yet five, with Carol and her grandparents. There were only a couple months of school remaining and then they'd have all day together during the summer. Two days a week, when Carol only had classes and didn't have to monitor afternoon study hall, she would wake up a little bit earlier than usual and get herself ready, followed by supervising Jack as made his bed, washed up, and dressed. Jack always insisted he could tie his own oxfords, but he always needed his aunt's help with the little navy, red, and yellow striped tie he was particularly attached to and always insisted on wearing whenever they went out.
Teaching, in general, would have been so much easier if Carol didn't have to hear upwards of fifty times a day questions for "Mrs. Aird" but she supposed she brought that problem on herself nearly a year and a half earlier. Every time she heard it, it was yet another prod to her psyche and reminder of the enormous hole in which she found herself on a daily basis. On some level, she wished she could let the girls just call her Carol, but that was far too informal in these circumstances. If she had been teaching at a college, she definitely would have considered that; however, that was practically a moot issue. She couldn't even call her students by their first names, always stuck calling them by their surnames. Sometimes, Carol wished the students knew that as a teacher, she had about ten times as many rules as them. The difference was though that if she was out of line, her punishment would be a bit more severe than just a conduct.
Since she was married, she didn't have to live in the faculty residence or be a housemother, although she had that choice when she started. That was one perk being married, she supposed, not having to live with a bunch of other teachers who would bore her to pieces and probably go on and on about their dates, what they did…
When she thought more about it, she realized living with them would probably be like college all over again, and Carol certainly didn't want to relive that. Carol was one of the few married teachers the school had hired for the start of the academic year with much of the male faculty otherwise and elsewhere engaged. There weren't many applicants for the position, and certainly not ones with qualifications and recommendations like Carol's or the fact that she didn't require any relocation stipend. It was only two or three classes per day with the occasional task of supervising study hall on Tuesday evenings: the perfect amount of time away from home and doing something meaningful.
She could have gotten her own apartment or small house somewhere in the vicinity, but her grandparents lived only ten minutes away and it was much nicer to stay with them anyhow. Her grandmother and grandfather were getting older; her grandmother was in particularly poor health, no stranger to practically weekly home visits by the doctor who kept insisting that she needed to hire a nurse, especially on those days Carol was away from home for a better part of the afternoon. Despite having offered to stay home, her grandfather insisted that she not even think of foregoing her position at the school, even if it was only a couple classes and a handful of responsibilities. Her grandfather was like that though, always encouraging her to be somebody and gain experience from whatever situation she found herself in.
Of course, that was the complete opposite of Harge's family. One reason Carol adored teaching was for the somewhat petty fact that it bothered Harge's mother to bits how a married woman of her "status" left the house nearly every single day for the sake of employment. It was also the perfect reason for Carol to hardly have to go there to visit them. She remembered how badly and how often they asked her to come visit in the months following their impromptu wedding and Harge's departure, but she couldn't leave school. After graduation and as soon as she was home during the summer, almost every other weekend Carol found herself on the train to Montclair for family luncheon. Harge's older sister, Marge, would often be there as well, and all Carol could wonder was what two parents would be so irresponsible as to give their children such irritating, rhyming nicknames.
Then during her visit at around Easter time, the first time they had seen each other since the wedding, Harge's mother greeted her with the grandest of smiles, then stared at Carol's waistline and returned her gaze back to her face and smile. The way she kept looking at her made Carol so uncomfortable being scrutinized like that, making her wrap the sweater she wore even tighter around herself and hold her arms closer to her body to prevent both of them from looking at her like that. After the third time she glanced downward like that, Harge's mother outright asked, "Is there anything you want to tell us, dear?" Shaking her head and nervously grinning, Carol replied no and draped the cloth napkin across her lap, then quickly pulled her sweater around her. Carol looked around as she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Harge's father smiling back at her and nodding his head, his mother trying hard to break a smile as she again tried, "You sure?" Both of them earnestly looked at her with the cheekiest of grins until she answered no one more time. It wasn't until she got back to school that she realized why they were looking at her that way, why they kept awaiting some kind of announcement or explanation.
Besides, there was no way it could have even been possible for her to be pregnant in the first place, and not like they even knew the half of how that wedding night went. Granted that hygiene class she took in college hadn't been all that graphic and detailed, Carol was pretty certain she couldn't have gotten pregnant from staying up and playing Monopoly, fully clothed in some oversized men's flannel pajamas along with her similarly dressed husband who was due to leave for the West Coast the following morning. She remembered how she and Harge spent a good ten minutes debating who would get the cannon token, playing until the early morning hours, smoking cigarettes, sharing a bottle of scotch while chatting about how all of this was going to work out between them; wondering how the hell out had all gone so far so fast. They would just sort everything out between them when Harge got home. If he got home, he reminded her.
There was such a rush of marriages between the holidays, no one would have ever noticed a wedding announcement in the Times or any other publication anyhow. Not like there would have been enough space in the papers with all the couples in the Tri-State Area trying to get married at the last minute. Not like either of their families necessarily wanted to announce to the world that they had gotten married. Carol didn't tell anyone back at college that she had gotten married; as soon as she got to campus, she removed the engagement ring and the silver wedding band, and tucked them into the back of a small lock box in which she kept her growing collection of valuables. Next time she was in New York, she told herself that she needed to get a safe deposit box because it was getting tiresome lugging the now cramped and heavy small metal case around with her.
As soon as she finished school and returned to her grandparents' house, the ring went back on. And every time Carol looked down at her hand, she reminded herself of what she had gotten herself into, especially with the ever-lingering and very real possibility that Harge might actually come back. Moreover, it wasn't as though he wanted to come back if it meant returning as miserable as his uncle had been after the Great War.
Carol liked her students. They were all about sixteen or seventeen years old, all girls. Rather, young ladies as the staff and trustees preferred to call them. Carol was that age not seven years earlier; how drastically her life had changed in just those seven years. Would the same happen to them too? Probably, she pessimistically thought, life never turned out as planned. The girls in her classes would make such a fuss over Jack every time he came in, bringing him snacks from the tearoom or coming up to him to say hello when class started or ended. At first, they thought Jack was her son since they had such similar eyes and a similar shade of that flat blond hair. "No, no," she told them with a skittish laugh, "he's my very sweet, very dear, littlest nephew who I look after every once in a while."
While Carol spent an hour with each of her classes, Jack would either sit and read, or sometimes follow along with the presentations, looking at the slides his aunt would show and listening to her talk about the artworks she presented. Not that he hadn't already been doing that since he was just over a year old. He was very quiet, watching along as the classes reviewed slides for their exams. Once the classes were over and the students gone, Carol would gather a couple chair cushions and slouch down onto the floor beside him and the projector, engaging him with questions to get him talking. He loved looking at the shapes, colors, and figures in the paintings and hearing his aunt tell him a story about it.
Sometimes, Carol would get to take him on a morning museum visit when she had a day off. After getting Jack ready to go out and ensure her grandparents were both settled with her being gone for half a day, she and Jack would take the train into the city after all of the commuters had made their way into lower Manhattan. Most of the time they would go to one museum and only see a couple rooms during their visit, then have lunch somewhere before taking a train home before the commuters filled every train leaving Grand Central heading east of the Hudson.
"What do you like in this one?" she asked as they stopped in front of van Gogh's Starry Night. Jack looked up at the picture with a big smile. Carol followed his eyes as they scanned the painting in front of them; she could see how they flew from the giant swirls in the middle to the moon in upper right corner to the big cypress tree to the left side, and then down to the little town in the foreground.
Starting to raise his hand to point, Jack stopped himself when his aunt gave him a brief shake of her head and he lowered his arm. "The swirls," he answered as his little head spun around following the clockwise flow of blues to gesture at what he wanted to point at originally.
"What else?" Carol asked, reaching down to grasp Jack's hand.
"The shade of blue."
"That shade is called cobalt."
"Cobalt," Jack repeated. "The moon is wicked pretty too."
Carol's breath hitched for a moment and reached her hand up to wipe the corner of her eye to mask the expression on her face. With the softest of laughs and the gentlest of smiles, she immediately uttered, "Don't say 'wicked,' sweetheart. Say 'very' instead."
Jack sighed in response and turned back to the painting. "It's very pretty."
"How many stars are there?"
Biting his lower lip, Jack glanced back at the painting then his aunt as he raised his hand just a little bit to count the stars, making sure it was acceptable for him to somewhat point at each star in order to count them correctly. He let go of her hand as he counted along to each of the bright swirled stars.
Holding up both hands, he showed his aunt and answered, "Ten."
"Check again."
Turning his head quickly to look back, Jack shrugged. "Is the one on the side a star?"
"Which side?"
Jack held up both his hands, noticing the L that formed with his left hand. "Like the letter L. Left. Left side." He showed his aunt the L-shape of his hand and smiled at her.
"That one is also a star, although it's a bit tricky to tell, isn't it?" Carol moved in to examine the elusive eleventh star, noticing the faintest orange dot in the middle. She looked back at the other stars gathered in the middle of the painting and squinted. "You know, all these stars kind of look like… " she trailed off as her eyes fluttered from star to star, ultimately blushing before she opened her mouth again as Jack looked at her expectantly, "...nevermind what they look like," she quickly said as she cleared her throat and changed the topic. She looked around the rim to see if anyone else was in there who might have heard her. "How many stars are there then?"
Jack recounted them and clutched his aunt's hand again when he had the answer. "Eleven!"
"That's right," said Carol in a low yet cheerful voice. She steered Jack with a gentle push of her hand to stand directly in front of her so she could adjust the grey cap on his head that had find askew. Somewhere behind her, there was a commotion of children's voices and laughter. A school group was entering the room and making the biggest fuss as they walked in with their tiny feet scuffling and shuffling along the hardwood floors. Couldn't they be quieter and pick up their feet properly when they walked? Carol thought, suddenly feeling much older than twenty-two for having thought it in the first place. Jack turned his head, also distracted by the noise as the group of twenty children came in. They were almost all bigger than him; all the girls dressed identically, all the boys dressed identically. As they approached them to crowd near the Starry Night painting, Carol noticed the boys' blazers adorned with a familiar crest featuring a dragon and a hammer.
"How about we go get lunch, Jack?" He looked up and nodded his head. Carol rushed him past the other children as they walked away from the crowd and their instructor. Carol shared a sympathetic and knowing smile with the teacher accompanying the children, knowing what it was like to herd that many young people in a small space like a gallery or a room of a museum. Admittedly, approximately twenty seventeen-year-old girls were quite another breed of issues compared to that lot all under the age of twelve, it appeared.
Walking out of the room, Jack stopped when he saw a little girl, older than him by a good few years, holding an older-style Brownie camera. He stood in front of her for a moment, observing the way she held the camera in both hands and pointing it in the direction of the teacher and a couple students, but somehow avoiding them completely and aiming for the floor. Jack looked down at their feet, curious to see what on the floor could possibly be more interesting than the van Gogh painting on the wall in front of them. As he further inspected, he noticed she was interested in the scuff marks on light-colored wood flooring - not the teacher and her classmates like he originally thought.
"I like your camera," Jack told the little girl before his aunt tugged his hand, drawing his attention back to her as they left the room.