Chapter 38
From the Journal of Honey Sutton March 31, 1938
Grace and I were halfway through our sandwiches when a troubled-looking Toppy joined us. She returned our greetings without much enthusiasm and looked reproachfully at Grace. "I know Rebecca can be a little thoughtless in the way she strings Henry and Pritchard along, but did you have to be so hard on her?"
Grace gave her a curious look. "What do you mean by hard?"
"She came into the shop just thirty minutes ago crying her eyes out. She overheard Mrs. Cramp telling Myrt Dumphries that she was a conceited little snip, and it was clever of you to have Lionel Marshall bring her down a peg."
Grace winced. "I don't think she's conceited so much as desperate for attention and I didn't tell Lionel to humiliate her. I just warned him about her crush on him. Leave it to Mrs. Cramp to put the worst possible construction on things."
Toppy didn't look entirely convinced. "Rebecca said that you didn't think she was good enough for Henry."
Grace's expression hardened a little. "As long as she's going out with Pritchard too, she isn't. Not to mention indulging in a crush on a grown man at the same time. I am sorry she was so deeply hurt. I can see Lionel was a little rougher than he needed to be, but at least he did the right thing and discouraged her."
"Yes," Toppy agreed, her glare softening a little. "You weren't motivated even slightly by pique?"
"Maybe slightly," Grace conceded shamefacedly, "and maybe I took a little too much pleasure in seeing her bubble pricked, but I never meant her any real harm."
I have to admit that I was feeling a little ashamed of my own glee at Rebecca's mortification.
From the Memoirs of Grace Bailey -
I awoke on the morning of Apr. 1, 1938 feeling relieved that I had come up with an answer to the question of whether Van would give his interview for the newspaper or for CRNB. Both Mr. and Mrs. Cramp were dissatisfied with it, so I was certain that it was a reasonable compromise. The interview would take place over the airwaves at CRNB so that it would reach more people. However, Mr. Cramp would be the interviewer and could plug the New Bedford Chronicle in the process.
Van would continue the interview at the newspaper office after the broadcast and the Chronicle would publish the complete interview. Hopefully, Mr. Cramp would be in a better mood now that Lionel had left town and was no longer around for his wife to fawn on. I had explained to him that Lionel was courtly to all women and any attention paid to Mrs. Cramp was completely innocent.
Listening to the portion of the interview conducted over the air, I was impressed. Mr. Cramp asked genuinely challenging questions. Van's answers were equally uncompromising. I don't think Mr. Cramp was convinced of the need for the European democracies to renounce the Nonintervention Pact and for America to repeal its Neutrality Act. Or of the need for both to intervene in Spain. However, I don't think he was prepared for Van's answer when he asked if the fascists were really so terrible since they ran off the Communists and Anarchists and restored peace and order wherever they went.
He was obviously shaken by Van's calm and sober description of the kind of peace and order Franco's soldiers would inflict on the people of New Bedford if they ever came here including the murders of himself and his wife for allowing one of their opponents to speak his mind on the air. I wasn't surprised that Max, Archie, Mother, Hub, Henry and I were likely to join them and a great many of our friends and neighbors in a mass grave at the bottom of one of the abandoned mineshafts outside of town. Honey and Toppy might be sent to a prison camp for slave labor instead, but it was equally possible that they would be shot anyway just for being related to Franco's political opponents.
Mr. Cramp probably wouldn't want Van to describe on the air what Franco's soldiers might well do to me, Mrs. Cramp, and the rest of the condemned women before our executions. I was pleased that a couple of times during the interview, Van cited articles in my scrapbooks on the war to supplement the evidence of his own experiences and those of the refugees to whom he had spoken.
… I was surprised afterwards when we exited the offices of the New Bedford Chronicle and Van took my arm and steered me away from the New Bedford Inn. We were supposed to meet Max and Honey and the children in their apartment there for supper. There was a nervous smile on his face as he asked me to bear with him. We needed to go somewhere first.
He led me down the sidewalk until we were opposite Ollie's Garage at the spot where we had first met exactly two years earlier. Then he stopped. I couldn't help wondering to myself why we were there. This was also the place where he began to draw me unwittingly into a swindle. The wound from the betrayal that almost drove us apart forever was healing. Anywhere else, most of the time, I could forget it existed, but not here. Van turned and spoke to me while still holding my hand. "Do you remember the first thing I ever said to you?"
I wasn't sure why he would bring up something nearly as painful as it was touching, but I answered anyway. "Yes. You said that you were falling in love with me at first sight."
"I was," he affirmed earnestly.
I protested, but not strongly. "You were setting me up to …."
Van put his hands on my arms and looked at me with a seriousness that instantly silenced me.
"Grace. I believed that was what I was doing, but I was fooling myself. I thought I saw the potential for a brilliant con …."
I admit I was baffled. "Didn't you?"
Van smiled warmly. "I intended a deception to trick you into taking part in my scheme. The next step should have been a plan to give you the brush afterwards, but I didn't even think of it."
I was starting to see a glimmer of what he was leading up to, but I needed to hear it from him. "Why not?"
"Because I didn't want to," he explained. "It took a couple of days to admit to myself what I knew deep inside from the first moment I saw your beautiful face. You were more than just someone whose uncanny resemblance to a Spanish princess was the key to a perfect swindle. You were someone I wanted to be with for the rest of my life. When I asked you to marry me, I intended it to be forever." I felt his hand take mine. He held it gently as though it were a baby bird. "What I told you when I proposed was the truth. I loved you from the moment I first saw you and I will love you until my last breath."
As I looked into his eyes, the love that filled them almost took my own breath away.
"Y …you brought me here to tell me that?"
"Yes, and for one more thing. I can't forget that, however true my love for you, our marriage began with a betrayal. There are two ways to remove that shadow. You could get an annulment."
I shook my head as tears sprang to my eyes and terror kindled in my heart. He couldn't want me to do that. Not after everything we've been through. Van smiled with a gentleness that immediately reassured me as did the words that he spoke. "…or we could make a fresh start, this time with our eyes wide open and no lies or deceptions between us." Van sank to his knees. "From this moment on, I will be true to you, through the best and the worst. I give you my life, my heart, and my devotion for as long as we both live." The question he asked next could not have been more truly sincere. "Will you pledge me the same, Grace, and accept this as a token of both our pledges until we can seal them with a second honeymoon?"
Suddenly, a small jewelry box containing an old-fashioned diamond engagement ring lay open in the palm of his hand. I recognized the ring as my mother's. He must have confided his intentions to her. She must have insisted on his using her ring for this occasion. The tears began to well up in my eyes. I didn't need to take even a second to think. The only answer I could give sprang from the deepest recesses of my heart. "Yes! I will! I love you, Van."
After taking the ring, I looked at it for a second before closing the box and placing it in my handbag. Van rose from his knee faster than I would have thought possible for a panther let alone a human being. He took me in his arms. Our kiss was long and heartfelt. The world disappeared from my senses. Only the touch of his lips seemed real.
In Three Weeks: Van on tour. Silverdome board meeting. Fear for a soldier son. Grace's fortune.
