Then Sings My Soul by Amy K. Sorrells Page B

her and their earlier years together. Had there not been a war going on, and most of the respectable men her age fighting in the Pacific or on some godforsaken front in Europe, Jakob knew he and Catherine would never have had a chance. In fact, Catherine had been engaged before, but her fiancé, the son of a Chicago hotel tycoon, had died a hero on a navy destroyer lost in the Battle of Guadalcanal.
    â€œNovember 13, 1942. Days before he would’ve been on leave … for the holidays,” Catherine had explained about her fiancé’s demise. A tear had rolled down her face and landed on her wrist, next to her triple-stranded pearl bracelet. She and Jakob sat on a scrolled, mahogany-trimmed, velvet settee in the lobby of the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. It was the weekend before Christmas Eve 1943, and the two of them were at a party, complete with Santa, who had arrived and begun giving presents to all the children in attendance. She was there because her father, chairman of the board of a steel company, was hosting the event. Jakob was there because Mr. Grünfelder, the jeweler he and his brother Peter had worked for, had invited him knowing he was alone, as he had been since Mrs. Stewart died from influenza in 1935, and Mr. Stewart died in 1941 from what appeared to have been a heart attack. Jakob had agreed to come to the party out of respect more than loneliness.
    The lights of the Christmas party, the strolling strings, the ballroom pounding with the newest sounds of Big Band and jazz, the corks popping and the ice tinkling against the sides of long-stemmed glasses had overwhelmed him. Preferring to keep to himself, he’d been warming one side of the settee for some time when Catherine, breathless from dancing and dressed in a silver, floor-length, single-sleeved sheath, plopped down next to him, at first barely seeming to notice he was there. Her dark-brown hair, pulled up with a glinting, jeweled hairpin into a smooth chignon, gleamed. He had tried not to let his eyes linger on her bare left shoulder, which reminded him of marble; it was, he thought, so exquisitely statuesque.
    She spoke, and he listened, as her dance-floor giddiness fell away to slower, more serious conversation. Perhaps the rum caused Catherine to lean toward him, to find comfort in the gray edges of his sideburns and his middle-aged shoulders, broad from lifting presses and running machines at the Brake-All factory every day. Or perhaps it was a subliminal aura of neediness he gave off unintentionally, his singleness exposed in a crowd of couples, that evoked within her a sympathy, initially, before striking an eventual mutual flame of physical attraction that had them both reeling, drunk from their infatuation with each other by Valentine’s Day, and married by June.
    She had terrified him at first. Catherine, her lithe frame, the way her hips swayed when she walked, teasing him like a puppy to follow her down Michigan Avenue as they’d gone Christmas shopping together the next day, the bottom edge of her wool gabardine dress flipping to and fro, skimming along the rounded edges of her perfect—so perfect—calves. Until Catherine, he’d never noticed the thinness of a woman’s fingers, the delicate way they lifted a champagne glass, or a cup of coffee, for that matter, and then the way their soft, cool ends pressed against the nape of his neck as he, trembling, had pressed his lips against hers for the first time. Loving Catherine had shaped him. Broken him, yes, but in ways that helped him live again. She had become, in fact, the religion he had lost long ago.
    â€œEleanor?”
    Jakob’s attention returned to Billy, who’d been calling and checking all the rooms for Nel. Jakob saw her first, chin in her hands, elbows resting on the edge of the deck railing. He nodded toward the deck. “There she is.”
    Billy followed Jakob’s gaze to where Nel stood.
    â€œI’ll take it