The End of the Point Read Online Free Page B

habit they all looked forward to—and that summer came up, and Bea confessed that she worried she’d not watched Janie closely enough and had let things slip a bit. Jane was twenty-four by then, married to Paul Strickland, a boy she’d met on the Point, expecting her first child.
    “There was a war on,” said Mrs. P. Just that.
    Perhaps it was forgiveness Bea was looking for. Or perhaps a part of her wanted to tell the whole story; even Agnes never knew it all. But it was not her way to hold the past up to the light, any more than it was Agnes’s or Mrs. P.’s. “I hope she doesn’t name the baby something dreadful,” said Mrs. Porter cheerfully, and they went on to talk about nursery colors as Bea knitted a sweater—yellow, with white edging—for Janie’s baby. “It will be a boy,” said Agnes (a girl, it would be, named Elinor). Together, they drained their glasses, then rose for their separate lunches.
    There was a war on —as if that explained everything.
    And in a way, perhaps, it did.

V
    I T WAS A SUMMER of waiting, eyes fixed on the sky. Grandmother Porter had given Helen a pair of birding binoculars for her sixteenth birthday, and she wore them around her neck, training the lenses on sky, sea or in between. My spyglass, she called the binoculars, and though she’d entered the summer with an interest in bird-watching, it evaporated before the twin pulls of men and war. You could look and look so hard you thought you spotted something ominous, but then the plane behind the clouds would be another cloud, the hump rising in the water a rock made visible by low tide. You could, if situated right (her bedroom window worked; so did the bow window in the attic), aim the binoculars at the soldiers manning the gate—here, one scratching under his arm, there, one cleaning his gun as he chewed gum. “He has a gun?” Dossy would grab the binoculars, try to focus, close one eye and try again. “He’s a soldier ,” Helen would say, though her pulse had sped up, as much for the hands on the gun as the gun itself, as much for the face, which had turned in her direction while she watched, rotating toward her as if the soldier (handsome in a blocky, ordinary way) felt the heated pressure of her gaze.
    One afternoon, Bea, Janie at her heels, caught Helen and Dossy at the landing window with the binoculars.
    “Let me see!” Janie lunged forward.
    Bea caught her by the collar, held her back. “Put that away, girls.”
    “Why?” Dossy asked.
    “For one thing, it’s extremely rude.”
    “Not to mention illegal,” said Helen.
    “Illegal?” Bea’s voice went high. She was beautifully easy to shock.
    Helen shrugged. “It’s all classified information over there. But don’t worry—we’ll use what we discover for the common good.”
    Bea reached for the binoculars. Helen ducked away, and Bea turned to call down the hall. “ Agnes! ”
    “Call in the troops,” Helen muttered.
    Agnes appeared from her room. “Well. What’s all this about?”
    “These two”—Bea jutted her chin toward them—“are spying on the soldiers.”
    “Give me those glasses,” Agnes said.
    Dossy, who’d gotten hold of them, dropped them deftly around her neck. “Don’t you love bird-watching? I think I saw a scarlet tanager.”
    “I’ll tell your father,” said Agnes.
    Helen blanched, but she would not let on. “Daddy? That we’re aiding the war effort? Just wait—we might spot a submarine. We’ll catch a spy. Heinrich Heidelberg. Or Masako Fujiwaka.” She liked the sound of German and Japanese, read aloud the words in the newspaper, collected them in her war scrapbook.
    “Who?” Janie asked, panicked. “Where?”
    “This war,” Bea said, her face gone pale, “is not a game.”
    “Her brother’s in it,” Agnes explained. “On the other side. Where there’s bombings.”
    “The other side ?” Janie shrilled. “Your brother’s a German ?”
    “The other side of the sea , love.” Bea’s voice shook.