Mrs Simmons liked a hot summer's day. It reminded her of home. It reminded her of her large family running around the property, her father on the tractor, her younger brother, sweaty and dirty, digging up trenches, her mother peeling corn ears or shelling pecans. Her grandparents were alive at the time. All four. Each one of them was keeping busy too: the women knitted blankets and socks for the boys stuck in different trenches in Europe; the men did the books and talked about what the President should do.
Mrs Simmons was simply Claire.
If there was no school, Claire helped her mother around the house. She read books. She wrote to her older brother who was stationed in Bournemouth waiting, presumably, to be shipped to France, although they couldn't explicitly say so in their letters. She also wrote to Corey. He was in Belgium already because he had not waited to be drafted: he had enlisted before everyone else she knew.
Mrs Simmons enjoyed her memories. They kept her company while her husband, the Mr. Simmons, the Head of Faculty, was at work. Her children were both in the final years of high school, and she had little else to keep her truly engaged.
Sure, she never sat idly: she was raised with traditional Mid-Western values, and recognised the early signs of Sloth and combatted them with all her might. While the shopping and the cleaning was done by the help, Mrs Simmons liked to be involved in many aspects of the community life. There was often some charitable cause to support, a lunch to attend, some organisation that needed pamphlets checked for spelling and mailed. Most of these came courtesy of her girlfriends in the neighbourhood or through friends at the University.
These activities, however, rarely grasped her full attention. She never immersed herself in the task at hand. Her hand was swift and her work impeccable, but, as the work required was often simple and menial, almost an excuse for various acquaintances to sit together and talk, she would find her mind waver from the present. The world before her eyes would slowly vanish, and she would live once more a day of her youth.
She never had an exciting life, but these memories had a certain liveliness that, at the age of fifty, she couldn't find in her present life.
Mrs Simmons was sitting at her bureau, flapping the pages of a photo album.
Her younger brother, Gene, would join the war effort a couple of years after Tom.
Tom had come back a hero: a shrapnel had bit on his leg, and the leg had to be amputated. He was now a wealthy car dealer in Topeka. Mrs Simmons rarely heard from Tom but was sure to receive a letter from Topeka on her birthday, which was June 6th, wishing her all the best, and postcard every Christmas from Florida, hoping for a family dinner one year, but the demands of the dealership still hadn't offered the opportunity.
Tom had married the prettiest girl in his year as soon as he had come home. On the night before the wedding, he had got very drunk with his friends, had come home late, and, finding Claire in the kitchen, had sat down, told her how proud he was of the girl he was going to marry, confessed that the shrapnel was in fact an infected would he had received getting caught in barbed wire. Apparently, he was trying to sneak out at night from the army barracks to visit a brothel. He still got a medal for it, a pension; and the prettiest girl in town had found him so irresistible to give him a blowjob in her dad's car.
As he was making this revelation to Claire, Gene was fighting the Germans trying to emulate his older brother. He too wanted to be a hero and get a blowjob from a pretty girl. Instead, he ended up getting shot by the Germans. Claire hoped her little brother, who was shortsighted and bookish, and never had much luck with women, could sneak out to visit a brothel once or twice before getting a bullet between the eyes.
Many of the boys she knew had joined the army. It was difficult to believe that there was now another war and that Mrs Simmons' kids might be drafted in a year or two. Her husband often assured her that he could pull strings, but she wasn't so sure. What was sure was that every day more caskets shrouded in stars and stripes were flown back, and that war is a big machine, and the Head of Faculty is just a man.
Many boys had gone to war and had not come back. Mrs Simmons remembered most of them. For fear of forgetting them, she had made a list. She kept that piece of paper filled with names in the photo album. The person corresponding to some names, the ones on top of the list, were still vivid in her imagination. Some were becoming indistinct, and she had to add little notes next to them:
'Mary Briar's cousin,'
'Twin brothers in Tom's class,'
'Lived in the red farm near the river.'
Mrs Simmons had not put Corey's name at the top of the list. That had been done on purpose. But her eyes went straight to his name every time she picked up the piece of paper.
Corey was a fine young man, the son of the neighbouring farm, and he and Claire had grown up together. When they were sixteen, they promised each other they would marry one day. Then war broke out and Corey enlisted and never came back.
Claire wrote to him trying to hide her sadness (what's sadness for when you're in a trench and the enemy is shooting at you?). She got a picture of herself and send it to him once.
Corey wrote every week. He talked about his plans for the future. He would come back, once the war was over, and marry Claire ('will you still marry me, Claire?' he often asked). He would work in his father's farm and maybe go to college to learn modern agricultural techniques to enhance the land yield. Maybe he would buy some additional land. He hoped to create a commerce of his produce with big buyers. Corey was smart and would have done all that, had the Germans not been some damn good with their aim. Not that you need much aim to drop cluster bombs from a plane onto men who look like little ants far away down below.
Corey's mother had come to tell Claire the news. The old woman was crying and was holding a letter in her hand. She was crazy with grief. It fell upon Claire, much younger and very heartbroken, to console her. The next day, the woman had returned with a framed picture of Corey.
Mrs Simmons had pasted this picture in the photo album. Sometimes, she looked at the blonde kid with large watery eyes, but she didn't feel any real pain anymore. He was one of those people from her past she didn't want to forget.
Now, Claire had been married for many years. She lived in a large city. In fact, she hasn't been back since her father's funeral five years before. Her life was much different. The world was different.
The biggest difference, as she reminded herself often, was that she was married to Mr Simmons.
Mr Simmons was rather good at rummy, while she was not; he was very good at making friends and ensuring they kept the friendships up, which meant that Claire was never bored or lonely. Mr Simmons, Henry, was more than anything a good man. He had always been decent to Claire, while she had heard of many women whose husbands beat them or neglected them or made them unhappy in one way or another.
Not Henry.
He remembered anniversaries. When the kids were little, he was always an attentive father. You couldn't find a fault in the man.
Maybe, if Claire felt uncharitable, she would think of him as, perhaps, a little dull. But, she reminded herself, she grew up surrounded by dull men. It was no surprised that she married out. Even Corey was destined to grow up to be dull, had the Germans not been dropping so many bombs on American kids.
Claire had met Henry through some family friends. He was studying Classics. Somehow, he had not joined the war. This had surprised Claire, but she had never brought it up. Not then, not since.
Henry's courtship was discrete but persistent. He visited often. He asked her out until she said yes. Then, he asked Claire's father for permission to marry the girl, and that was that.
Claire had always been popular. She was a pretty girl with blonde hair. She had the elfin features, the upturned nose, the prominent cheekbones, and the small pouty mouth, of the Irish. She had a thin waist and long thin arms, but she also had a rather prominent bust. She didn't look like a farmer's daughter. She had some glamour to her figure that she carried with modesty.
Claire was aware of the hungry glances that many young men gave her, but she accepted Henry's proposal, almost without a second thought, because, somehow, she accepted that he had asked her before everyone else, and, in her eyes, that gave him some sort of right.
The marriage had been successful, like it often happens when expectations are not too high, and Mrs Simmons considered herself happy.
She closed the photo album and put it back on the desk drawer. The day was now warmer.
The house was filled with the sense of peace of a house full of love that is empty for a moment and gives you a chance to enjoy the silence. The help had left for the day; her children wouldn't be back until dinner time, and Mr Simmon was busy with running the Faculty.
The only sign of life was the passing roar of a car and the clang clang of the lawn mower outside.
Mrs Simmons walked downstairs. She was wearing a loose dress with a print of flowers. The cloth stuck to the back of her thigs. She could fill a sweat collecting under her armpits.
She poured herself a glass of water and, as she drank, she parted the calico curtains and spied on the young man in the front garden pushing the lawn mower. Clang clang. Clang clang.
Jack came around once a week to help with the general upkeeping of the house. He cleaned gutters; he trimmed hedges; he planted flower bulbs; he watered plants in vases.
Henry had found him and recruited him for this task. He studied at the university. He played in the football team too.
Mrs Simmons noticed the blonde mop of hair. Kids wore it longer these days, she thought.
The young man walked back and forth, pushing the mower.
