“No,” she said softly. “He came back home and married the girl who was waiting for him. Had four kids, including Thomas’s father.” She looked up. “I told you I’d been in love twice. John was the first great love of my life.”
I sat there processing this as she spread the photographs in front of me. It explained her fierce devotion to Thomas. But it also didn’t. How could she watch the children and grandchildren who could have been hers if the world was different and not feel bitter about what she never got to have?
I didn’t ask that question out loud, but Ada could read me. “It took me a long time,” she said. “I was willing to give up my family, my life, everything. And I know he loved me too—it was why he wouldn’t do the same. Ours wasn’t a story with a happy ending, no matter how you looked at it. If we came back here, odds were good we’d find a cross on our lawn, if not our house on fire, even in Philadelphia. I didn’t really know how the world worked yet. I thought if we loved each other enough, we could find a place where our differences wouldn’t matter.” She shook her head again. “I was young and stupid and sheltered. John knew better. The world loves to destroy what it doesn’t understand. Some things can be hidden to be protected. Some can’t.” Lillian reached over and took her hand. Had it been me, she would have swatted me away, but she let Lillian’s remain, smiling at her tightly.
I tried to imagine an Ada so in love that she was willing to flout some of the most ingrained rules of our society. I didn’t know any mixed couples even now. Though to be fair, I didn’t know many people who weren’t Jewish. We tended to huddle together on this side of the Atlantic, even more so since the hazy events in Europe during my early childhood. And marrying outside the faith was so strictly forbidden. Conversion for marriage was relatively new and still viewed as strange. Even I, rebel that my family thought I was, wasn’t immune. It certainly hadn’t been a pastor’s son whom I crashed through a stained-glass window with.
And Ada, born more than half a century before me, was willing to be someone whom her family sat shiva for over a man who married someone else soon after.
It was too daunting to fathom.
“When we came back from the war—not long after those pictures were taken—I opened my eyes. I saw how people actually treated others. And I realized that John was smarter than I was.” She shook a finger at me. “And you know I don’t say that lightly.” She thought for a moment. “No. We both wound up where we were supposed to be.” She grinned at me. “We’re a lot of scandalous women masquerading as house cats in our family. Me, your mother, your aunt Mildred, you—”
“What did Aunt Mildred do?”
Ada laughed. “That’s a story for another day.”
But one thing still didn’t add up. “How did you go from a broken heart after the war to matchmaking?”
“She was good at it,” Lillian said. “She fixed me up with Don.”
Ada waved her free hand in the air. “That was nothing. He never took his eyes off you. He thought you weren’t real. An angel who had saved his life. You were just the first face he saw when he woke up in the hospital.”
Lillian shook her head. “She lies, you know,” she said to me in a conspiratorial whisper. “He saw her first, but she told him I was the one who saved him.”
“He was too nice for me. And I was otherwise occupied—”
“With John?” I asked.
They both looked at me. “No,” Ada said slowly. “That was before I met John.”
Hemingway, I thought triumphantly.
“To answer your question,” Ada said, annoyed at the interruption. “I started with some soldiers and nurses in Europe. When we got home, I somehow had a reputation of being able to make perfect matches. I did it for free until the mothers came calling. Then I realized it was a way to support myself. My father was gone by then, and I had his money, but I wanted to earn my own. And now I have forty years of experience.”
“And Thomas?”
“I wanted a fresh start after the war, with my parents gone, and John had spoken so lovingly of Philadelphia that I decided to go see it for myself. Before long, it was home. Eventually, we ran into each other, as was bound to happen in a city of nearly two million people—if you don’t want to see someone happy with their wife, that as much as guarantees that you will.
“We kept in touch after that though. His wife is lovely. There’s no bad blood there.”
“Does she know about you?”
“She does. They had a good marriage.”
“Had?”
Ada shook her head. “He died a few years ago. Heart attack. They ran in his family.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It was a loss for his family, for sure.”
But that didn’t answer my question about Thomas. “Are you paying for Thomas’s education?” I asked bluntly.
“What a leading question. He has a scholarship to medical school.”
I looked at her from the corner of my eye. It was certainly possible that he had gotten a scholarship, but she hadn’t said no. “Is it a scholarship funded by the Ada Heller Foundation for Matchmaking Sciences?”
Lillian burst into laughter. “Oh, Ada, I adore this one. She’s the most like you of any of the family.”
Ada shook her head. “No, you bigot. He earned that all on his own.”
I stared at her again, marveling at this woman whom I had begged my parents not to send me to for the summer, thinking she would be a stodgy old bore. But she was wrong—she wasn’t masquerading as a house cat. She was a leopard, camouflaged against her surroundings, but still living her life exactly as she saw fit.
And I hoped, when I looked back on my life a half century from now, I would be doing the same.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The mail brought two items of interest that week. The first was an envelope marked “Photos—do not bend” from Dan. I tore into it as soon as Ada offered it to me.
“Have at least a little self-control,” she murmured.
“Why? He’s not here to see it.”
She shook her head but didn’t leave, clearly wanting to see the contents of the envelope as well.
I emptied it onto the coffee table, a stack of black-and-white images tumbling out. The top one was me in the ocean, a wave just breaking at my back, my mouth open in an expression of surprise at the cold water and the joy of the moment. I smiled, wondering how he managed to snap it at the exact perfect moment. The next was me splashing toward the camera, which, as I recalled, caused a hasty retreat on his part. There were posed ones where I lay in the sand. I had been going for sexy and carefree, but the photos were more artistic than I expected. He had an amazing eye. There was a close-up of my face. I wasn’t looking at the camera. Something else had captured my attention, and I was struck by how beautiful I looked—so much more so than when I looked in the mirror. Another of me sitting at the end of the jetty. I hadn’t realized what he was going for when he posed me, but when I saw the picture, I instantly knew—it was the Little Mermaid sculpture in Denmark, spray coming up behind me again at the exact second needed to capture the essence of the moment.