“Say a quick hello to your father, girls. Then wash up for supper.”
Amelia poked her head through the parlor door, a happy little angel of seven in a red-and-white gingham sundress, shortly followed by Alice, another helping of strawberry short-cake in an identical outfit.
Those dresses were the only thing identical about the girls. Although they were twins, they barely looked like sisters.
Amelia was
small, with fine, dark, beautiful features exactly like her mother’s. Alice was taller, blond and lanky, and had the misfortune of taking after her father, though I will say that our family looks had settled better on her face than on mine.
“Remind me again which one of you is which,” I said with a stern expression.
“Daddy, you know,” said Amelia. Alice squealed in delight.
“No, I’ve completely forgotten. How am I supposed to be able to tell the difference when you look exactly alike?”
To Amelia, that was a scream.
Meg walked into the front hall. “Come along, girls. You heard what I said.”
I pointed at Alice. “Oh, now I remember. You are… Amelia.” And then, pointing at Amelia, “So that means you must be Alice.”
“And you must be Mommy!” Amelia pointed at me, giggling at her own cleverness. Was there any sweeter sound in the world?
I knelt down and kissed her, then her sister, and gathered them both for a big daddy-hug.
“Where have you two been causing trouble today?”
In a ridiculously loud stage whisper Alice said: “We’re not allowed to say… but we were hiding in church.”
Meg called again, with the business end of her voice: “Girls!”
“Mama says you’re in trouble,” Amelia reported. “She says you’re in the doghouse.”
“And we don’t even have a dog!” Alice crowed with laughter.
“Girls!” That voice brooked no nonsense.
They ran from my arms.
Chapter 11
I WILL NEVER FORGET the rest of that evening, not a moment of it. Not a detail has been lost on me.
“You and I are living in two different marriages, Ben. It’s the truth, a sad truth. I’ll admit it,” said Meg.
I was flabbergasted by this announcement from my wife of nearly eleven years. We were sitting in the parlor on the uncomfortable horsehair sofa Meg’s father had given us as a wedding gift. We had just finished an awkward supper.
“Two different marriages? That’s a tough statement, Meg.”
“I meant it to be, Ben. When I was at Radcliffe and you were at Harvard I used to look at you and think, Now, this is the man I could always be with. I honestly believed that. So I waited for you while you went to law school. All the time you were at Columbia, in New York, I was wasting away at my father’s house. Then I waited some more, while you went to Cuba and fought in that war that none of us understood.”
“Meg, I’m sorry. It was a war.”
“But I’m still waiting!” She twirled around, her arms outstretched. And in that one gesture, in those few seconds, I realized the complete truth of what she was saying. Our house was not the one on Dupont Circle that Meg deserved, but a small frame bungalow on the wrong side of Capitol Hill. Cracks were visible in our plaster walls. The piano had broken keys. The roof leaked.
Through soft sobs Meg continued, “I’m not a selfish woman. I admire the cases you take, really I do. I want the poor people and the colored people to be helped. But I also want something for my girls and me. Is that so wrong?”
She wasn’t wrong. Maybe I had let her down by worrying too much about my own conscience, not thinking enough about her expectations and the life she believed she was getting when she married me.