Read Online One Heart by Jane Mccafferty - Free Book Online Page A

comes along with their interest. Their pure interest, and it gets you interested again.
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    It was that way with Raelene there in the cabin. I told her all about James, how after he got back from a year in Korea he and Wendell and I once lived in a house not much bigger than the cabin, a place Ivy found for us about a half hour away from the camp, a view of the Adirondacks out the back window. How we just let Wendell paint and crayon all over the walls, and how that looked just fine. I told her of the claw foot bathtub in the backyard with the makeshift wall around it that I decorated with pictures cut from Look and Life magazines and how Wendell loved it. Never wanted to get out of the nice warm water we’d heat on the woodstove. And how he would sing to himself “Silent Night, Holy Night,” no matter what the season. His voice was sturdy and made my eyes water on certain nights back then. I was a sentimental girl at least when it came to that child. I also told Raelene how James worked in a lumberyard and came home smelling like fresh wood and fresh air. And always had a story to tell me, though he was not a real talker. Could I believe I was saying all this to Raelene, a camp counselor in a cabin? No. She kept asking questions anytime I’d pause. Questions mainly about Wendell, which was natural.
    James and I, we’d eat supper with Wendell, then put him in to play with his trains and cars and stuffed whatnots. We had a whole room for his pleasure. We never made him pick up his toys in that room. He could do what the hell he wanted in there. His father and I believed in letting him be natural. It was our own idea. We’d tell him, “Go use your imagination.” And sometimes we’d play with him. And other times, maybe two or three times a week, we’d get out the Jack Daniel’s and listen to music, and talk. Sometimes Ivy would come over and join us.
    We never thought much about it, James and I. His father and my father, and sometimes my mother, they drank like sailors. And their friends did too. So we never thought even for a minute, Maybe there’s a problem here. Maybe it’s not good for Wendell to see us drinking. We just thought, The wars are over for a while, so here’s to what we call life.
    Raelene said, “People back then didn’t know any better.”
    She was trying to make me feel better.
    We drank. We played our music. Everything from Bill Monroe to B.B. King. Some nights we were perfectly sober. We were never really out of control. We loved Wendell to death. And sometimes the three of us would sleep right out under the stars, Wendell in the middle in a blue hooded jacket.
    Meanwhile all my old friends from Delaware were moving to houses with natural gas furnaces and H-bomb shelters. I’d get a letter from someone and they’d have to tell me about watching The Aldrich Family or Milton Berle on the television, and what did I think of Betty Furness, the Westinghouse lady. I visited once or twice and saw how they thought they had the good life under their belts because their houses were brand-new and clean. You could eat a meal in their toilet bowls. Sparkling clean and new! Out with the old. New everything. And they’d send me Reader’s Digest articles that said the Communists were taking over our children’s minds in the schools. They believed the articles were true. They were smack in the middle of things.
    We were out of it. Our house looked like Hogan’s alley. We read the paper, sometimes we went to David Walton’s bar to watch Ed Sullivan. And we had a radio. But other than that, we entertained ourselves. The more McCarthy stirred up the fear of reds, the crazier people got. We had neighbors two miles away who were crazy like that. They avoided us entirely.
    But things were booming out there. It was boom time. The country was rich. Clean! Happy! A new car born every second, and two or three lucky babies.