Free Flowers From Berlin by Noel Hynd Page B

and Franco, were all firmly in power and flagrantly rearming themselves. Central Europe seemed destined to be carved into pieces and the two major democracies of western Europe, France and England, seemed fragile and indecisive. Meanwhile, America slumbered.
    Laura thought of England and thought of her father. Both were very distant. Then her thoughts rambled further as she grew very quiet over coffee. She was now thinking of Edward Shawcross.
    Married as she was to a different, more exciting man, she began to see Edward in perspective for the first time. It was as if she had stumbled across some torn black and white photograph from an old scrapbook.
    Edward had been a decent man, she decided. Thoroughly decent, but painfully predictable. She viewed a variety of images of him, things she had once seen: Edward neatly assembling his books, tightly knotting his tie, sharply combing the part in his hair, methodically planning their engagement and their life. Edward's orderliness had been his finest quality and his most serious undoing. Personal relationships were like that. Laura would opt for chaos and iconoclasm with a man like Stephen every time. Who ever heard, for example, of a divinity student with a red Nash convertible? Who, indeed? And that was just for starters.
    Stephen reached across the table and took her hand. Much in the manner of a medieval courtier, he kissed the back of it and snapped her out of her reverie.
    "A penny for your thoughts," he said.
    "I was thinking," she answered, "of how much I love you."

FIVE
     
    "It's perfect," Laura said.
    "Then we'll take it," Stephen said, turning to the rental agent.
    It was the autumn of 1937, and with exactly that much discussion, Laura and Stephen rented a comfortably snug white wooden house on a shady New Haven street five minutes' walk from the Yale campus. There Stephen entered divinity school and continued his studies. As the semester passed, Laura and Stephen's circle of friends grew. They invited friends in for dinner, visited other couples, and went out to dinners. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland, the civil war in Spain, and Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia were far, far away and rarely discussed. The execution of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnap-slaying of Charles Lindbergh's son was a topic much closer to home.
    With her husband, Laura took drives in the New England countryside on resplendent weekend afternoons, and they saw plays previewing in New Haven in advance of Broadway openings. Together they found small French and Italian restaurants in quiet corners of New Haven, and twice Stephen took Laura down to New York for the weekend.
    They behaved both like newlyweds and newly-in-loves and Stephen even took her to the Yale-Harvard football game, which sold out the Yale Bowl in November. By midway through the fourth quarter she vaguely began to understand the rules. Harvard won thirteen to six, which to a girl from Wiltshire, sounded like a pretty wild game of football.
    After Thanksgiving, Laura grew restless. Stephen was immersed in his studies and in the Christian Political Union at Yale, an extracurricular discussion and lecture group which sought, among other issues, to address a Christian response to fascism and Marxism. The Union met once a week at the outset. Then it was two evenings. Then four. Laura indulged her husband and thought it wise to find an outside activity of her own.
    At Christmas, she found one. Upon the suggestion of a faculty wife who had become a friend, Laura went for an interview at the New Haven Board of Education and applied for a job. When the all-male board heard the tones of Wiltshire in her voice, they figured she was cultured. They asked her about Shakespeare. When Laura revealed that she knew all about not just Shakespeare, but also Milton, Chaucer, and Keats, they hired her to be the fourth-grade homeroom teacher at the city’s elementary schools. American men, Laura pondered upon accepting the appointment, had a