Cry in the Night Read Free Page A

I’d carry it, too,” Jerry agreed. “I’m only surprised that she’s let go—”
    We were up from the basement of that branch of the Smithsonian and pushing out a side door into the heavy hot air of Washington, DC, on an August noon. He was holding the door and we were on the sidewalk when his words cut off sharply. He knew from my face that Mother was dead. She had given me the sixpence two years before when she knew her time was almost gone. I’ve always been bitter that her doctor didn’t tell me the truth, that he connived with her to keep me in ignorance. Because there were weekends I had not come home from college to see her, and I would have come if only I had known.
    I blinked against the bright Washington sunlight and reached out impulsively to touch his hand. “It’s all right. She laughed when she gave it to me and said it was my turn to have a talisman, that it had only failed her once.” It was my turn to break off. I wasn’t going to tell this bony-faced stranger everything in my life this hot summer day. Not that the little sixpence had fallen from her purse once at an airfield and a young American had helped her find it, the young man who would be my father and who would fly until the day nine years later when his plane slammed into a North Korean mountainside. After his death, Mother put away the sixpence and only brought it out years later to give to me.
    I knew in my heart that she had not actually believed it had magical properties—though there was a strain of Irish in my mother’s blood—but it had saved her once and brought her my father, and it was something real she could give me and there was little enough of that. Something to remember her by, to remember her gay blue eyes and the courage and good humor that never failed her, even when my father was killed.
    She once told me, “If you survived the Blitz, you can survive anything.”
    So I smiled up at the straw-haired young man. “It’s just a coin, really.” I dropped the sixpence into my purse and stepped back a pace from him, showing that I was making no claim on his time, that this pleasant interlude was over. “Thanks so much for helping find it. How do they put it? It has great sentimental value.” I held out my hand to him.
    He ignored it, tugged at my elbow, and pulled me along with him. “You haven’t had lunch.”
    Since his lecture had started at ten, obviously I hadn’t lunched. “No.”
    “Let’s go eat.”
    I don’t remember what we ate or where. It was a small café. He discovered before we had half finished our sandwiches that this was my first trip to Washington and I hadn’t had time to see more than the White House and two branches of the Smithsonian. So we downed our iced tea in a gulp and he took me on a tour of Washington.
    We walked for miles. It was hot, as only that beautiful city can be hot in August, but the sky was vividly blue, the buildings a gleaming, shining white. He knew his Washington so I saw it not only as it is today but as it was when it first began. Then the White House sat in a naked field overlooking the Potomac and the half-built Capitol was visible a mile and a half away across a swamp. We tramped all the way from the Capitol to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue (it was still a dirt road in Lincoln’s day), and Jerry explained why the Treasury Building butted into the famous street, preventing the clear view from Capitol Hill to the White House that had been L’Enfant’s intent. President Andrew Jackson was so irritated about the wrangling over the department’s site that, when badgered while out waking one day, he had banged down his sword cane and said, “Right here!” and that’s where the Treasury now stands.
    We ended up in Georgetown and along the way I learned quite a bit about Jerry Elliot: “. . . came to Georgetown on a scholarship. I’m the sixth of seven in a long line of scholarly but poor Elliots. My dad teaches at Western Reserve