This book, published by Chatto & Windus ($32.95), has been selected as the Great Read in the January issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. On sale in major book stores everywhere, it will display the red and gold Great Read sticker, recommending it as the outstanding book of the month. The following extract is taken from the first chapter: Anyone in the neighbourhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met. It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St. Cassian was its usual poky self that day – a street of narrow East Baltimore rowhouses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlors. The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the windows of Sweda’s Drugs. Mrs Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr Kostka’s Model B Ford puttered past, followed by a stranger’s sleekly swishing Chrysler Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher’s battered delivery bike. In Anton’s Grocery – a dim, cram-packed cubbyhole with an L-shaped wooden counter and shelves that reached the low ceiling – Michael’s mother wrapped two tins of peas for Mrs. Brunek. She tied them up tightly and handed them over without a smile, without a “Come back soon” or a “Nice to see you.” (Mrs Anton had had a hard life.) One of Mrs Brunek’s boys – Carl? Paul? Peter? They all looked so much alike – pressed his nose to the glass of the penny-candy display. A floorboard creaked near the cereals, but that was just the bones of the elderly building settling deeper into the ground. Michael was shelving Woodbury’s soap bars behind the longer, left-hand section of the counter. He was twenty at the time, a tall young man in ill-fitting clothes, his hair very black and cut too short, his face a shade too thin, with the dark whiskers that always showed no matter how often he shaved. He was stacking the soap in a pyramid, a base of five topped by four, topped by threeàalthough his mother had announced, more than once, that she preferred a more compact, less creative arrangement. Then Tinkle, tinkle! And Wham! And what seemed at first glance a torrent of young women exploded through the door. They brought a gust of cold air with them and the smell of auto exhaust. “Help us!” Wanda Bryk shrilled. Her best friend, Katie Vilna, had her arm around an unfamiliar girl in a red coat, and another girl pressed a handkerchief to the red-coated girl’s right temple. “She’s been hurt! She needs first aid!” Wanda cried. Michael stopped his shelving. Mrs Brunek clapped a hand to her cheek, and Carl or Paul or Peter drew in a whistle of breath. But Mrs. Anton did not so much as blink. “Why bring her here?” she asked. “Take her to the drugstore.” “The drugstore’s closed,” Katie told her. “Closed?” “It says so on the door. Mr Sweda’s joined the Coast Guard.” “He’s done what?” The girl in the red coat was very pretty, despite the trickle of blood running past one ear. She was taller than the two neighbourhood girls but slender, more slightly built, with a leafy cap of dark-blond hair and an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen. Michael came out from behind the counter to take a closer look at her. “What happened?” he asked her – onl her, gazing at her intently. Get her a Band-Aid! Get iodine!” Wanda Bryk commanded. She had gone through grade school with Michael. She seemed to feel she could boss him around. The girl said, “I jumped off a streetcar.” Her voice was low and husky, a shock after Wanda’s thin violin notes. Her eyes were the purple-blue color of pansies. Michael swallowed. “A parade’s begun on Dubrowski Street,” Katie was telling the others. “All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven’t you heard? And a couple of friends besides. They’ve got this banner – Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps! – and everyone’s seeing them off. They’ve gathered such a crowd that the traffic can hardly get through. So Pauline, here – she was heading home from work; places are closing early – what does she do? Jumps off a speeding streetcar to join in.” The streetcar couldn’t have been speeding all that fast, if traffic was clogged, but nobody pointed that out. Mrs. Brunek gave a sympathetic murmur. Carl or Paul or Peter said, “Can I go, Mama? Can I? Can I go watch the parade?” “I just thought we should try and support our boys,” Pauline told Michael. He swallowed again. He said, “Well, of course.” “You’re not going to help our boys knocking yourself silly,” the girl with the handkerchief said. From her tolerant tone, you could see that she and Pauline were friends, although she was less attractive – a brown-haired girl with a calm expression and eyebrows so long and level that she seemed lacking in emotion. “We think she hit her head against a lamppost,” Wanda said, “but nobody could be sure in all the fuss. She landed in our laps, just about, with Anna here a ways behind her. I said, ‘Jeepers! Are you okay? Well, somebody had to do something; we couldn’t just let her bleed to death. Don’t you people have Band-Aids?” “This place is not a pharmacy,” Mrs Anton said. And then, pursuing an obvious connection, “Whatever got into Nick Sweda? He must be thirty-five if he’s a day!” Michael, meanwhile, had turned away from Pauline to join his mother behind the counter – the shorter, end section of the counter where the cash register stood. He bent down, briefly disappeared, and emerged with a cigar box. “Bandages,” he explained. Not Band-Aids, but old-fashioned cotton batting rolled in dark-blue tissue the exact shade of Pauline’s eyes, and a spool of white adhesive tape, and an oxblood-colored bottle of iodine. Wanda stepped forward to take them; but no, Michael unrolled the cotton himself and tore a wad from one corner. He soaked the wad with iodine and came back to stand in front of Pauline. “Let me see,” he said.
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