The Photograph - Hardcover

Ellis, Virginia

 
9780345444844: The Photograph
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345444841 ISBN 13: 9780345444844
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

As a nation of young soldiers marches off to war, two women left behind will embrace a final keepsake, a profound reminder of the moment before their lives changed forever—its bittersweet images telling the story of an innocence lost, of a love just beginning, and of a family that may never be whole again. . . .

THE PHOTOGRAPH

In her highly acclaimed hardcover debut, The Wedding Dress, Virginia Ellis earned a place among the new stars of women’s fiction with her unforgettable portrait of sisters mending their dreams from the tattered remains of the Civil War. Now she triumphs once again in this stirring new novel of hope and the enduring spirit of those bound by the passions of the heart.

For Maddy Marshall, it was a time of jitterbug contests and drugstore sodas. Then on her seventeenth birthday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Suddenly all the boys she grew up with, including her fiancé, ran off to enlist, ready to defend their country. It was all incredibly romantic to Maddy. Until the fateful night before her brother Davey shipped out, the night she danced with dreamy Lieutenant Tull-Martin, the night of the photograph—when her world fell apart.

Only Davey’s frail wife, Ruth, will discover what happened, helping Maddy to hide her grave secret and its undeniable consequences. Together these sisters of the heart maintain a deception that, like the shifting reflections of a picture, becomes a beacon of possibility to be cherished until fate brings their men home.

Written with warmth and grace, The Photograph is a moving celebration of the women who lived, loved, and came of age in a time of overwhelming heartbreak.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Award-winning author Virginia Ellis has written a dozen romance novels under the name of Lyn Ellis, and her literary short stories have been included in collections of modern southern writers. Her books have been translated into ten languages. She is also a founding partner of BelleBooks, a small press devoted to publishing the unique voices of southern women.

Aus dem Klappentext

As a nation of young soldiers marches off to war, two women left behind will embrace a final keepsake, a profound reminder of the moment before their lives changed forever its bittersweet images telling the story of an innocence lost, of a love just beginning, and of a family that may never be whole again. . . .

THE PHOTOGRAPH

In her highly acclaimed hardcover debut, The Wedding Dress, Virginia Ellis earned a place among the new stars of women s fiction with her unforgettable portrait of sisters mending their dreams from the tattered remains of the Civil War. Now she triumphs once again in this stirring new novel of hope and the enduring spirit of those bound by the passions of the heart.

For Maddy Marshall, it was a time of jitterbug contests and drugstore sodas. Then on her seventeenth birthday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Suddenly all the boys she grew up with, including her fiancé, ran off to enlist, ready t

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Chapter One

—MADDY—

I’ve decided I’m not a good Catholic because I’ll never forgive the Japanese for ruining my seventeenth birthday.

It was December 7, 1941—the day they bombed Pearl Harbor. The day that President Roosevelt proclaimed would forever live in “infamy” for every red-blooded American. That kind of sentiment didn’t leave much anticipation or appetite for birthday cake, or for forgiveness. It was enough to make a girl good’n mad.

We were at war.

I suppose I should have counted my blessings that seventeen years earlier, Mother didn’t have the imagination to christen me Pearl. She chose biblical names instead; David for my older brother, and Madelyn for me. I’ve always gone by Maddy.

As for my birthday cake, I did have one—on Monday instead of Sunday. But Mother cried the whole time she mixed the batter and poured it in the pans. The layers rose lopsided, and I swear I could taste a slight saltiness. Maybe it was just the metallic taste of fear. My brother Davey had joined the Marine reserves back in June, and now that we were officially at war, we all knew what that meant. He’d be one of the first to go.

The bad news didn’t end there. At my halfhearted, one-day-late birthday dinner, my boyfriend, Lyle, announced that he had joined the Navy. To say this was a shock to me would be like saying the world had stopped spinning at 8:05 p.m. and would continue once more when this whole war thing was settled.

Lyle and I were “almost” engaged. He’d even kissed me in the back row of the movie theater during the newsreel before It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. I’ll never forget it because that very night we’d secretly promised to marry as soon as he had a good job and could earn my mother’s permission. And now he’d gone and joined the war without even telling me first. Then, to announce it in front of the whole family—my mother, Davey, and his wife, Ruth—on a night that should have been my celebration, like he’d just grown a foot taller and we should be proud, added salt to the wound.

I’d had little experience with wounds in 1941. By the following year when my eighteenth birthday rolled around, however, I was a good bit more uncomfortably acquainted. What I didn’t understand then and do now is, wounds are like ghosts—the initial pain might cut you to the ground, but if you can get up, sometimes with the help of others, you can survive and go on. Even as the phantoms follow in your wake.





My brother Davey got his orders a week before Christmas 1941. He was to pack enough clothes for three days, then report immediately to a place called Parris Island, South Carolina, for training. After that, he’d ship out to parts unknown. My mother was inconsolable. I hadn’t seen her cry so much since we’d lost my father to a heart ailment (what he’d called his “bum ticker”) when I was ten. Life in general, and my mother in particular, had never been the same after that. She’d seemed to decide that she had to take control of every detail in our world in order to make things safe. It was enough to make a girl, a headstrong girl like me, anyway, want to scream.

Unable to bear the thought of Davey traveling halfway around the planet to go to war, I suppose, Mother concentrated on South Carolina and how far her son would be from Pennsylvania and home. Ruth, Davey’s wife, who had as much, or more, reason as Mother to weep, held herself together admirably. I’d never considered that being a wife and having babies could be a risky undertaking, but maybe Mother was right. Perhaps the world was a dangerous place. Ruth was barely out of the hospital after her second miscarriage, which had almost killed her. That and the large dose of sulfur they gave her for the infection.

If you ask me, I think it did kill her. I was there, I know—she’d nearly scared me into the next world, too. Since both of Ruth’s parents were dead, our family and a few neighbors had taken turns sitting by her hospital bed when she’d been so ill. I’d been with her early one morning two weeks into her confinement when Davey had collapsed from worry and fatigue on the couch in the waiting room. The ward was quiet—the nurses and doctors off in another wing. I was minding my own business, thumbing through an old Saturday Evening Post I’d practically memorized when I heard what sounded like a sigh.

I looked up, but Ruth seemed asleep, as she’d been for two days or more. Niggling worry made me look closer. Moments before, her chest had been moving up and down. Now, it seemed still.

My heart took several labored beats. As I rose from the chair to move closer, I noticed a telltale brightness near the window. At first I thought dawn’s sunlight had found the curtains. But then I saw her. It was Ruth, or the bright reflection of Ruth standing at the window.

Looking at me.

Seconds ticked by before she turned and floated through the glass.

I dropped the magazine and ran down the hallway wailing that Ruth was dead. Luckily, the nurses didn’t believe me. They rushed back to the room with a doctor and did what I hadn’t thought to try. They brought Ruth back, somehow. And Davey had been so happy he’d forgotten to strangle me for scaring everyone.

Ruth never mentioned being dead, but she did get better after that. She got to come home, walking with the help of a cane, right on time to help us send her husband off to war.

The morning Davey was due to catch the train south, my so-called boyfriend Lyle showed up, joining the men in war talk about how they’d make the Japs pay for their treachery. Mother made us take turns standing with Davey on the snowy grass in front of the holly tree so Mr. Jenkins next door, surrounded by an audience of other neighbors, could take snapshot after snapshot with his Kodak. Mother believed pictures were required on every occasion, happy or sad. I can’t count how many times she’d said, “It’s all I have left of your father.”

I depended more on my memory, although, every year on the anniversary of my father’s death when we got out the old photo album, there was a certain comfort in the fading images. When I was younger, I’d thought if I looked at them long enough, they’d move, or my father would speak to me. I swear once, I saw him smile. But after growing up, I realized they were only pictures.

As we posed for the camera, everyone acted happy, shak- ing Davey’s hand or clapping him on the shoulder. Everyone except Mother and Ruth. Mother’s smile seemed frozen on her face, and Ruth looked dreadfully pale as if she’d cried the whole night and had nothing more to say.

To me it seemed terribly romantic. Davey was going off to see the world, and Ruth would stay behind with us. Not for the first time I felt a twinge of envy. Boys got to do all the exciting things while the girls had to stay put. Lyle could quit school and announce he’d joined the Navy without so much as a “by your leave.” I could just imagine my mother’s reaction if I came home with the same news. She’d erupted like Mt. Vesuvius when I’d talked old Mister Freed into letting me work at the drugstore after school. Not because we didn’t need the money, but because it made me look too independent—a nice word for being headstrong. And it made it a little harder to keep track of her baby girl. In this gossipy town she’d usually known where I was going before I even got there. The possibility of me taking off to parts unknown...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345444841
ISBN 13 
9780345444844
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
321
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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