Her Mother's Daughter by Marilyn French

Author:Marilyn French [French, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780345353627
Publisher: Ballantine
Published: 1987-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

5

BELLE AND ED HAD one more ordeal to pass through on their road to secure status in the middle class. The recession that followed the end of the war sent many businesses into decline, and Bunnell was one of them. In May of 1949, it finally shut its doors. Along with many other men, Ed was out of work, and could not find a job at his rank.

Arden was six months old, and had been sick with a fever for a week. Anastasia was feeling cooped up in the one-room apartment, and had asked Brad to come home in the afternoon, pick her up, and drive her to her mother’s house, then pick her up there in the evening. She didn’t call first. Belle was always home. Brad dropped her in front of the house, and drove off, not noticing the long ladder propped in front of the house. Ed was standing on it, scraping peeling paint from the clapboard on the upper story. Anastasia peered up at him, Arden in her arms, her paraphernalia on the sidewalk beside her.

“Hi!”

He turned and waved.

“How come you’re home?”

He just waved again, and turned back to his work. Anastasia rang the front doorbell. Belle answered it, her face drawn.

“How come Dad’s home?” she asked cheerfully (as always).

Belle grimaced, turned away, and walked into the living room. Anastasia followed. Belle turned back after the door was closed. “He lost his job.”

Anastasia paled. “He was fired!” This seemed inconceivable: her careful, efficient, methodical father, fired?

Belle didn’t answer. “Take off your coat,” she sighed. “Do you want some tea?”

Not until she was an older woman did Anastasia discover that her father had not been fired, that the company had failed. Belle spoke rarely about the event, but always appeared to blame Ed for what had happened to him. Ed did not speak of it at all. The heavy dark counterpane of grim depression so usual in that house settled once more.

Who but Ed would set about repainting the house the day after losing his job? But in a week he had regained enough presence to go looking. There was nothing, and after a month, he took a job on the night-shift assembly line at Republic Aircraft for two dollars an hour, and a day job repairing vacuum cleaners for fifty cents an hour. For a year and a half he continued in this schedule, five nights a week at Republic, six days a week at Hoover, earning altogether eighty dollars a week, not quite enough to get them through. He never complained. When he was home, he painted the house or worked on the car. Belle made hats, managed to make 250 hats a week now. Joy was finishing high school, was a member of a clique, and needed this certain sweater, this skirt. But she asked for little, as little as she could. Nor could Anastasia help her parents.

In November of 1950, the same month Billy was born, Ed found a good job with the

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