The Road Taken by Rona Jaffe Read Free Book Online Page B

Alfred, but he had been a part of their family, and after he was gone there was a great gap. Sometimes she wished she had been nicer to him. She had so many questions about what was fair and what was not, and why people had to suffer so much, and she had never been able to answer them. Here she was, so happy with Tom, but it seemed there was always a reminder that something bad could happen, as if life were a balance, a kind of scales.
    And yet, it was curious how even in the face of such unpredictable and tragic events as they all had undergone, and probably would again, people clung to thoughts of future happiness with such obstinate optimism: love, marriage, children, careers. When she looked around she saw that they just kept going on. People buried their dead and made plans. No matter how helpless they were in the face of fate, they kept trying to make things better.
    Rose began to think there was something about human nature that was admirable. Or perhaps stupid.Or perhaps, simply innocent. But what else could you do?

Chapter Five
    In the spring of 1917 America entered the war. Feelings were mixed about United States involvement in a place so far away, in a conflagration that seemed to have so little to do with this country. Many people still didn’t want to send American doughboys to Europe to fight, but because the Germans were so openly hostile to the U.S., and France and England were in such danger, President Wilson (who had won his first term on an election platform of “no war”) had finally decided war was unavoidable. The propaganda machine cranked up to make the war into a noble cause. Anti-war demonstrators were dealt with harshly; some were lynched in the streets by angry mobs.
    On the other hand, this war to rescue the “decadent” Old World seemed romantic to a lot of young men. They felt they were knights from the novels they had read in school. None of them had ever known a war, much less one three thousand miles away. There were grizzled veterans of the Civil War still living, with their tales of violence and death, but that was the past. These optimistic, eager, strong young American men felt they were Ivanhoe.
    “Over there,” the popular song went, “Over there . . . the Yanks are coming . . . the drums rum-tumming . . . And we won’t come back till it’s over over there.”
    Along with the other healthy local young men, Tom Sainsbury was drafted. Therefore, because they would be separated for what might be a long time, he and Rose decided to become officially engaged a year earlier than they had planned. She had a tiny diamond to wear on her left hand before he left for Fort Riley in Kansas, and she wrote to him every night. Tom had been lucky enough to be kept stateside, in the Quartermaster’s Corps, building and repairing things, but as the war effort escalated Rose worried that he might be sent overseas. She knew he wanted to go, that he had requested it, and that frightened her most of all.
    Her letters were passionate and effusive, since you could say what you wanted to a man as long as you were far away. She pretended to be strong, but she wasn’t, and some nights, after she had sealed her letter with a kiss, she was unable to sleep at all.
    Their small town had turned into a boom town because of the war. The war effort had increased the demand for products from the local rubber factory, and that in turn led to fifteen hundred people being employed there, in that one place, a quarter as many people as had been living in the entire town in the year of Rose’s birth. They were mostly immigrants—from Italy, Portugal, and the Portuguese Islands—who had joined the original Yankee settlers and the Irish, the blacks, and Native Americans, to make Bristol a kind of mini country itself, or so it seemed to Rose.
    “Dearest Tom,” Rose wrote. “I hope and pray every day for you to be well and safe,
here
in the United States! You wouldn’t recognize what has happened to our