This is a much different story than the ones you normally find here. This story I’ve written for my mother; placed it here at her request. It’s the story of her father, a man none of us truly knew aside from what he allowed us to see and the oral history others passed along.
Echoes of Europe: The story of a diamond
The diamond, a brilliant single multi-faceted carat, is fabulously perfect. She’s been assured she’d not find one so flawless now. It was born in another age when quality was valued over quantity, when demure was still considered tasteful. She had it assessed nearly thirty years ago, and even then it was worth more than her very nice car. The gemologist looked stunned that she’d let him take it off her finger, had her accompany him to his work bench so that no one could later accuse him of switching the stone.
She wears it, unafraid that it will bring her harm though some question that as reckless. She waves those cautionary voices aside; the ring’s not brash enough to draw attention to itself. Also, jewelry is meant to be worn. What’s its point if you lock it away in shadow. Some gems even lose their fire if hidden. She knows diamonds do not. Still, she wears it all the same.
The ring has a story, one she’s known for years, one that was handed to her with the platinum circlet itself, and it’s a tale she loves to tell for its passion, its history, its heartache. She’ll share it with you if you ask.
Early 1940s, Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a wealthy manufacturing family gone gently into decline. In this culture it’s the pedigree that counts. He’s fallen in love and wants to marry a girl from his own social set. She’s pretty enough, not quite a beauty, you know how these WASPy Southern families are. They marry amongst themselves, and the genes don’t always translate well. She might have done Cotillion, probably a true deb, undoubtedly DAR and UDC, Junior League and Garden Club, too.
Dancing at the Cavalier on Atlantic Avenue, moonlit walks along the beach. Those were golden days for a young couple in love. He bought her a ring, slipped it on her left hand, a perfect single-carat diamond. She had visions of their home in Ghent with curtains in the windows and their children running up and down the hardwood stairs.
Then Hitler happened, and he joined the army. He didn’t wait to be drafted; it just wasn’t done. He shipped out with Patton’s Third. He landed at Normandy, not at Omaha – further up the coast at Utah Beach, and he was at war for a very long time, saw truly horrific things that change a man forever. The boy who left was lost to the girl except when his letters arrived. She probably tucked each one away, under her pillow until the next one whistled through the brass mail slot in her parents’ door. Undoubtedly, she lived at home.
She wrote letters, too. He clung to them, used them as his way to see Heaven while walking through the Nazis’ Inferno. In his mind, he held the visions of the home she would create in Ghent. He savored them, went to sleep with those pictures in his head along with pictures of her and the knowledge that she would be waiting when he sailed home.
May, 1945, VE Day comes and goes. He will now go home and marry his girl. After all the hell he’s seen, despite all the blood guilt he now carries, her face, her precious face, will offer salvation. But the American GIs are kept in Europe for months to help clean up the mess. Weeks – months – go by, but finally, finally, he’s at her door. He stands, changed irrevocably, but offering her all he is and has, and sure she will offer the anointing for a new life, a new soul. He holds out his war-defiled hands waiting for her benediction, but when he leaves her, it’s his ring he holds.
He arrives home and says nothing to the parents and sister who await, anxious to see their son and brother shed the mantle of death he’s been wearing. Instead, he treads heavily to the basement where he opens the roaring coal furnace. He can’t look at the ring again, can’t face down the devastation of his dreams. He hurls the ring into the fire along with the hope he’s carried, then slams the furnace door. He marches up to his bedroom, and presses the door closed, leans against the wood. Without her absolution, it’s impossible now to block out the battlefields of Europe; the dead will forever stay with him.
His parents glance at each other. The phone rings, and his mother answers. It’s the girl. In a rush, her story comes out. His mother, ever a practical woman, quickly concludes what her son must’ve burned, and tells his father to let the furnace’s fire die. She instructs her husband to retrieve the diamond from the ashes when the embers have cooled in the morning.
The next day, the young man reconsiders his rash decision to destroy the ring. He knows by now the setting will have melted, but the stone – that very expensive stone – carbon hardened by elements and time – will remain untouched. He goes to the furnace and stirs through the ashes. That act, coating his hands with gray soot, chunks of blackened matter, leave him gasping for air, tears streaming down his face his mind trapped in a moment in time standing before Buchenwald’s blackened, gaping ovens. He finds nothing; his father beat him to it.
1970s, Norfolk, Virginia. The old lady sits with her middle-aged son. She plays with a ring on her right hand. It’s an intricate, Edwardian platinum setting with a perfect diamond in the center, flanked by two trilliant diamonds. The son notices the ring again, feels sure it had a different center stone at one time, perhaps a ruby. She’s worn it for years; he’s admired it for years, but he doesn’t know where it she acquired it. He assumes his father gave it to her. Every time he’s asked, she gets a twinkle in her eye and evades the question.
Today, she’s rather talkative. Maybe she’ll talk about the ring. He asks. She glances at her hand, then up at him, assesses him in that searching way that only a mother can. She nods to herself. She’s come to a decision.
She tells him a story about a night right after he’d come home from Hitler’s war. He remembers that soul-crushing night well. Kay had sent him packing. He’d not expected it, not at all. She’d written him letters throughout the war, even until the time he’d arrived home. She’d signed them all “Love,” and he’d believed in it. He’d thought they were getting married. That image of her in his head had carried him through the savaged corpse of Europe. The curtains in Ghent were to have been his sacrament of Reconciliation, his absolution. But she’d found someone else. She’d not wanted to send him a “Dear John” letter. There was no feeling for him in her seemingly selfless act; it was just patriotism. Just as girls had given up wearing silk stockings, they didn’t send “Dear Johns.” So, she’d continued the ruse, and he’d felt like a fool – her fool.
He’d thrown her ring into the furnace, let it burn, not wanting a reminder of her, of the hope he’d handed her that she’d thrown back into his face. Early the next morning, he’d panicked over the amount of money he’d literally caused to go up in smoke. He’d combed through the debris – that awful debris – on the furnace floor, but had been unable to find the stone, thought that perfect stone lost forever. As his mother speaks, he feels himself grow angry, betrayed again.
His mother winds up her tale. So, the diamond was never lost. His ears are almost disbelieving. She’d stolen it from beneath his sleeping head. His own mother had stolen his diamond. She’d taken his beautiful, expensive diamond and placed it, concealed it really, in a setting she’d long had, and only spoken of it once in whispers to his sister who had kept the secret, too. His mother had worn it – flaunted it – daily for years.
Now, she sits across from him and smiles beatifically. She’s waiting for his absolution. So much time has passed, she expects it. She has no sense of the ghosts who have accompanied him since 1942, no idea those ghosts wouldn’t leave because that diamond wasn’t worn by the woman who refused him sanctification. He feels himself growing warm, his collar growing tight. He wants to rage at her, roar the fire that’s burning him alive but cannot. He never could, not where his mother is concerned. Instead, he’ll go home and rail at the woman he did marry, “Not-Kay,” and the children he had with her.
His mother dies later that month. She bequests the ring with Kay’s diamond to her oldest granddaughter, his daughter with “Not-Kay.” Instead, he takes the ring and tries to force it on his wife, his trophy, a true beauty queen, not from his social set, and not approved of by his parents. This woman he also took dancing at the Cavalier and walking along the beach. This woman he’s spent thirty years punishing for not being Kay. She refuses the other woman’s diamond, one of the few times in her life she will go against him. He takes the ring and locks it into a vault, into shadow. It will be years before he honors his mother’s bequest and surrenders Kay’s diamond to his daughter. The ghosts never leave him. His daughter only learns the story of Kay from his sister.
The daughter buried her father almost four years ago now. She wonders if, with his last breath, when he closed his eyes for the final time, whether the ghosts departed and if he was at peace. She prays it was so. “Not-Kay” has been gone less than a year.
Someday her own daughter will wear Kay’s diamond in the Edwardian setting, and then a granddaughter will wear it in turn. She hopes the story will follow the ring. The diamond has a tale to tell.
The Unexpected Life 