“Who says I’m trying to accomplish anything?” Ambrose threw the cigarette to the grass, grinding it under his foot.
Ambrose was leaving his job at their father’s iron ore and shipping company on the Great Lakes. He’d been an undergraduate when the US got into the war, and he’d immediately wanted to enlist, along with half his class at Princeton. His father tried to convince him that finishing college was more important than dying in a trench in Europe. Such a justification might be fine for others, but Ambrose knew what his conscience told him to do. Action, that was the only basis for judging a life, or so he’d decided after declaring a major in philosophy. When Ambrose revealed that he intended to refuse officer’s training and enter the army as a private, he delivered the news with a pert lecture to his father on Rousseau and the veil of ignorance.
But Israel was nothing if not a seasoned strategist. Appalled, he promised his son a trip around the world after the war, if he’d only graduate college before enlisting. Ambrose couldn’t resist the lure. In this way he was weak; he’d admit it. But then the war ended quickly, with most of the men Ambrose knew barely finishing their training before the armistice was announced.
He still wanted his trip, even more so since he felt he’d been cheated out of fighting. But after graduation Israel lagged on his promise, insisting Ambrose come home and work first.
If Ambrose was going to work, he had thought he might at least be useful. So he’d taken his Kant and his Kierkegaard and his Nietzsche down to the mines and talked to the men about their lives. After a few trips, his father asked to have lunch with him at the Union Club downtown. The men were uncomfortable with him in the ore yards, his father explained. The manager at the mine was complaining. You have to respect their work, his father told him. Ambrose had quoted St. Augustine to his exasperated father, who patiently explained that such things were fine for study, but one didn’t live one’s life based on them.
“He just gets in the way when he goes to the mines,” Ethan said now, turning to May as if Ambrose weren’t there.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ambrose said. “Thank you for the party.” He put an arm around May’s waist, wanting to bring her close, wanting to change the subject. He was leaving to see the world, his dream for years. He didn’t want to think about the mines. He landed a kiss in May’s hair, which he’d meant for her cheek.
“Just don’t come home with some tropical disease,” May said, elbowing him. He kissed her again, this time at the corner of her mouth.
“Come home with a bride,” Ethan said, and Ambrose held May a little more tightly into his side. Ethan could sometimes blunder.
“Corrupting a spinster?” Ambrose said, trying to cover his brother’s faux pas.
Ethan fumbled with his glass and then drained it. “Some maidenly sister of a British officer stationed out in God knows where.” He said it in a hearty, joshing tone, trying to cover up his suggestion, in front of May, that Ambrose come home with a wife. “Even you could land a girl like that.”
Ambrose had a moment of mercy for his brother. Could Ethan be blamed for saying what everyone else thought? Ambrose’s travels would have him gone for at least a year, perhaps longer.
“No corrupting,” said May, joking and clearly not upset by this topic, to Ambrose’s surprise.
Ethan cocked his head, as if hearing something far away. Then he held a hand out to May and said, “I seem to remember that you like this song.”
Ambrose watched his brother lead her off, wishing he’d thought to ask her first. May did like the song, how attentive of his brother to remember. A sour note echoed in Ambrose’s head like a faint memory. He watched Ethan take her in his arms, watched them begin to sway on the dance floor—parquet over grass in a corner of the lawn surrounded by summer phlox and asters.
Ambrose had met her first. He’d been intrigued from the start, lots of men were. And he’d spent a good amount of time trying to unravel why. May was lovely, yes, but so were lots of other girls. She was smart, but not uncommonly so. Ambrose had finally decided, after a good amount of contemplation, that what May had was an appealing underlying hunger. An appetite that peeked out at him through her varied reading, her smoking, her love of movement and music. She radiated a constrained want, glimpsed tantalizingly, but fleetingly, since they’d been going around together. She was the only girl in their set who knew the passwords to the hidden speakeasies he and his friends liked to frequent downtown. Really, most of those back rooms were grimy. May would order herself a lime-based cocktail and polish it off with a smart licking of fingers. Her subtle watching of the world, a lying in wait, as if given an opening and a blind eye, she’d grab the biggest piece of cake, the costliest jewel, the rarest prize. It was part of her allure—an appetite that matched his own.
Now, in a patch of afternoon sunlight, watching May laugh at something Ethan said, sweat dampened Ambrose’s collar. Their social circle was small, and he and Ethan went to all the same parties. In this way, May had become Ethan’s friend as well. But that laughter, it lit an unfamiliar feeling in Ambrose, a tiny spark of anger, fanned with a breeze of envy. He noted how close Ethan was holding her, and how quickly she’d agreed to dance. But this laughter between them—it was as if he’d caught them doing something much more intimate. He tried to remember the last time he made May laugh like that.
He felt his sister, Loulou, at his side before he saw her. She had the habit of stealth. “Are you already gone?” she asked. “You look a million miles away.”
Though only fifteen, she’d begged Israel to let her come to May’s party. It was both a testament to his father’s fondness for May and to his general cluelessness when it came to raising a daughter that he let her, imagining an afternoon of punch and cake under supervision of the faultless May. It was not the sort of thing a girl with a living mother would be permitted.
Loulou singsonged in his ear, “You love her.”
“What do you know about love?” Ambrose noted a Rensselaer twin had tried to cut in on May, but Ethan had rebuffed him.
“I know you two belong together. And don’t think it escaped my notice that you didn’t deny it just now. Or ask me who I was talking about, for that matter.”
He turned to focus on her then, noting she was almost chest-height now. “I suppose there are little bluebirds circling my head? Or is it the stars in my eyes?”
Loulou watched May’s feet while ghosting the dance steps, practicing.
“Longing glances across the dance floor, lots of sighing?” he continued.
“Make fun, but I know the truth.”
“Tell it to Sweeney.”
“Maybe I’ll tell it to May,” she said, starting for the dance floor.
Ambrose grabbed her forearm, stopping her.
“See,” she said, looking where he’d grasped her arm. “Proof’s in the pudding.”