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The Last Embrace
Pam Jenoff
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING TITLE THE ORPHAN'S TALE OUT NOW!Forbidden love in the time of war, this is essential reading for fans of emotional historical romance, perfect for fans of Katie Flynn and Maureen Lee.August 1940 and 16-year-old refugee Addie escapes Fascist Italy to live with her aunt and uncle in Atlantic City. As WW2 breaks, she finds acceptance and love with Charlie Connally and his family.But war changes everything: secrets and passions abound, and when one brother’s destructive choices lead to the tragic death of another, the Connally family is decimated, and Addie along with them.Now 18, she flees, first to Washington and then to war-torn London where she is swept up with life as a correspondent. But when Charlie, now a paratrooper, re-appears, Addie discovers that the past is impossible to outrun. Now she must make one last desperate attempt to find within herself the answers that will lead the way home.Praise for Pam Jenoff:‘ heartbreakingly romantic story of forbidden love during WW2’ - Heat‘Must read’ - Daily Express
Praise for (#ulink_57a34142-9f46-53ba-a5ca-355d9ad0d09a)
Pam Jenoff (#ulink_57a34142-9f46-53ba-a5ca-355d9ad0d09a)
‘This love story will melt you.’
—Company magazine on The Ambassador’s Daughter
‘This is historical romance at its finest.’
—Publishers Weekly on Kommandant’s Girl
‘In her moving first novel, Jenoff offers an insightful portrait of people forced into an untenable situation and succeeds in humanising the unfathomable as well as the heroic.’
—Booklist on Kommandant’s Girl
‘Poignant and intense’
—Good Book Guide on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘Jenoff explores the immediate aftermath of World War II with sensitivity and compassion, shedding light on an often overlooked era of European history. She expertly draws out the tension and illustrates the danger and poverty of Eastern Europe as it falls under communism. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.’
—Library Journal on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘… well constructed and a real page-turner’
—Birmingham Jewish Weekly on The Diplomat’s Wife
PAM JENOFF is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller Kommandant’s Girl, which also earned her a Quill Award nomination. Along with a bachelor degree in International Affairs from George Washington University and a master’s degree in History from Cambridge, she received her Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania and previously served as a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department in Europe, as the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon and as a practising attorney. Pam lives with her husband and three children near Philadelphia where, in addition to writing, she teaches law school.
Visit Pam at www.pamjenoff.com (http://www.pamjenoff.com)
The Last Embrace
Pam Jenoff
For my own brother, Jay
Contents
Cover (#u69f16c77-e36f-59bd-8fc5-02b6b3ed8ffb)
Praise (#u4c9007a8-a326-50ec-8279-3500f59dae17)
About the Author (#ud0c2ceea-35fc-539a-acf4-bceddd5ea88a)
Title Page (#uee2aa475-930c-5d9e-a60d-b3caca78465d)
Dedication (#u714b709a-434e-5c6b-8c05-0fca1aec5634)
PROLOGUE (#u0e3fd4c2-77d6-5ae4-a40b-4ba1eb915d71)
PART ONE (#u0c48c856-d66c-5f8c-9d61-b8dd15809001)
ONE (#uf37f8b8d-3c50-50dc-bfda-bff53b83b108)
TWO (#uc1bb76a0-48d8-543e-a825-153819ba4639)
THREE (#u14b7db85-e57a-5775-b73c-370deadca283)
FOUR (#u5ed72a0a-0856-55fa-b3f5-ccd851699f1c)
FIVE (#u41c7f88d-b6ee-5235-b92e-a62b5bf803de)
SIX (#u6286ef8b-d808-59e3-b149-6370038b8aaf)
SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Reader’s Guide for The Last Embrace (#litres_trial_promo)
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpages (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
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New Jersey August 1944
I sense home before I can see it. Five miles out, the wet salt air enters my mouth and fills my lungs, and the cries of the gulls rise harshly to meet me. But it isn’t until I round the final curve and the wide expanse of murky brown water springs into view that the lump in my chest grows and my eyes begin to burn.
“Damn you,” I say aloud as I pull to the side of the road. “God damn you to hell.”
Absecon Bay remains unmoved. Its calmness seems hypocrisy.
I shift Uncle Meyer’s Buick into gear once more; the engine revs weakly. It is midafternoon and the sun glistens high above the water, the air late-summer warm. The smell of fresh lemon polish rises from the dashboard, mingling with the sea air and lingering cigar smoke. A station wagon passes in the opposite direction, laden with beach chairs and a barbecue grill. Despite the war, some things have not changed: the flight of the summer renters, dusting the sand off their sticky-fingered children and returning to normal life as Labor Day nears, is still the earliest sign of fall. Along the Black Horse Pike on my way down the shore, the prices of peaches and cherries and other summer produce, plentiful even while other food is in short supply, have been slashed, preparing to give way to apples and gourds. Hand-painted signs tout end-of-season corn. Some of the drive-up stands that did a brisk business in hot dogs and root-beer floats all season have already closed.
I pull onto the road, passing signs that exhort me to watch the coast vigilantly for German ships and to buy war bonds. As I guide the car along the edge of the bay, high sea reeds rise from the marshes, obscuring my view of the water. Exhaling, I focus on the casual tangle of shops ahead. Everything had seemed so much bigger in my mind’s eye. Now the houses, with their blackout curtains and flags, are miniature, like the ones Uncle Meyer built alongside his model railroad. The whole place could use a good coat of paint.
I begin to climb the gentle arc of the bridge. A narrow strip of water lined with docks and small boats comes into view. I startle, accidentally slamming on the brake and scarcely hearing the car horn that blares behind me.
I wipe my damp palms against my cotton skirt, which has become wrinkled during the drive. Then I press my foot against the accelerator and continue south, clenching the steering wheel, knuckles white. “Knock it off,” I mutter aloud through gritted teeth, “or you’ll never make it.” Which, as I think about it, does not seem like a half-bad idea.
Just before the Esso station marked with rationing notices, I take a right turn and then another. Then I turn left onto Sunset Avenue. The block which holds such weight in my memories is nothing more than a half dozen or so houses parallel to the bay, built decades earlier, their clapboard fronts scarred, like the lined face of an old woman, from the storms they have weathered. As I drive past each house, I rattle off mentally the people who had lived there: at the fourth house, kindly Mrs. Henderson, known as Aunt Molly to the kids, Joe and Louise Steiner at the fifth. Many of the neighbors are undoubtedly the same—except for the sixth house, which has been vacant since the day the Connallys drove out of my life forever.
I stare straight ahead, trying to focus on the road. But it is no use—even in broad daylight, I see the nightmare that I have lived so many times in my sleep: I am standing on a narrow, deserted strip of the boardwalk, looking out at the vast green-gray ocean. I watch as the tide comes in and the water level grows continually higher. A black wave rises like an enormous hand to twenty feet or more. The wall of water crashes down from above, knocking me to the ground and enveloping me completely. I fight, unable to stand or breathe, as the water fills my lungs and swallows me whole.
Suddenly my vision clears, the image gone as quickly as it came. I tell myself that it isn’t real, that the past will not return. Why be afraid when there is nothing left to lose? But it is no use.
My nightmares have returned again, the surest sign that I am home.
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Washington, DC November 1943
I did not fight the umbrella which blew inside out as I stepped from the streetcar. Instead, I clung tighter to my nearly soaked cloche to hold it in place against the icy rain that slanted sideways across Pennsylvania Avenue. Navigating the slick pavement carefully, I swam through the midafternoon crowd, mostly women and a few men too old or broken for service, who were waiting in line at the Red Cross canteen truck for coffee, or making their way between government buildings and the makeshift tent offices that lined the Mall.
Brushing the raindrops from my overcoat, I slid under the awning that shielded the security booth outside the Department of State Building, pausing to fumble for my press pass. The guard eyed me incredulously as he scrutinized my credentials. Ignoring him, I gazed up at the White House, pale against the stormy gray clouds. Something moved on the roof above, the swivel of an anti-aircraft gun pointed upward. My heart skipped. Washington was a city occupied not just by the thousands who had come here to work, but by the army that defended it as though the Germans might at any moment descend from the sky.
Lowering my eyes, I caught a wistful glimpse of my disheveled reflection in the window of the guard booth. I’d left the rooming house in good form to a sky that, if not sunny, had certainly not suggested this downpour. Arriving at the Post, I expected a day like most I’d had these past few months, typing stories from shorthand notes on a Remington at a desk barely wide enough to hold it, pressed close to a dozen other girls. I didn’t mind; I needed work and I was grateful that my high school secretarial course had qualified me for it. Though it would have paid a few dollars more, I had dreaded the prospect of working as one of the government girls at the War Department. I couldn’t bear to endlessly type letters telling families that their sons were not coming home, seeing Charlie’s face in each of them.
During my first few months at the news bureau, the work had been quiet and predictable. But one afternoon nearly two weeks ago, a man with his sleeves rolled up had opened the door to the steno pool. “Italian?” he bellowed. A cloud of cigarette smoke appeared before him as he exhaled, making him seem a gray-haired dragon. The room fell silent. Chip Steeves, managing editor of the Washington Post, never came into the typing room. “My secretary is out and I need someone to call a translator.” Impulsively, I raised my hand. Then I looked around. I was the only one and I started to lower it.
But Mr. Steeves was already weaving his way through the desks, descending upon me. “You can find me someone to translate Italian?” He spoke through the cigar stub clenched between his teeth.
“No.” I looked at him squarely. “I can do it myself.”
He eyed me for several seconds, his face a scowl. “Well, come on,” he barked impatiently, as though I, and not he, had hesitated. I could feel the eyes of the other typists on me as I walked from the room.
“Montforte, isn’t it?” he asked, surprising me as we entered his office. The desk was covered in piles of papers, the floor littered with dirty coffee cups.
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Addie, that is Adelia.”
He didn’t introduce himself; he didn’t need to. Chip Steeves was legendary as journalist and terror. “You’re the girl who caught that mistake in the U-boat story.” I straightened slightly. My job was only to type articles, not proofread them. I had seen an error in one of the stories, though, a date that I knew from my own reading was wrong. I had pointed it out to Mr. Steeves’s secretary, who oversaw the typists. But I did not know that the message had been passed on—or that I had received credit. “That was good work. You speak Italian?”
“Yes. I was born in Trieste.” Being foreign-born was not something that one announced loudly these days, and I’d worked hard to remove all trace of an accent. This might be the first time it was an asset.
He thrust out a pen as if he might hit me with it, and I fought the urge to cower. “Well, translate this, Adelia Montforte.” I took the paper he offered and moved an overflowing ashtray from the nearest chair, then perched on it and scrawled the translation hurriedly. It was a cable about a skirmish that had taken place near Salerno, brief but with a few military terms I wasn’t quite sure I’d gotten right.
When I finished, I handed it back to Mr. Steeves, who scanned the page. “This is good.”
“I could do better with more time,” I offered.
“Couldn’t we all? But you don’t botch the feel of it, like the real translators do.”
After that, Mr. Steeves sent more translation work my way through his secretary. But he had not reappeared himself—until this morning. “Montforte,” he hollered as he stuck his head into the steno pool, causing me to jump. I’d leapt up and grabbed my pen and pad, assuming it was another translation job. But when I started for the door of his office, he waved me away. “Be at the State Department this afternoon at three.”
I stared at him blankly. “Me? But why?” He tossed me a press pass and disappeared into his office.
The guard handed back my pass now, along with a visitor’s badge, which I pinned to the collar of my blouse. I stepped uncertainly into the massive lobby of the State Building, marveling at the high chandelier, better suited to a ballroom. But before I could take it all in, Mr. Steeves appeared, grabbing me by the arm. He led me unceremoniously past a marble staircase, down a corridor and into a room with a long oak conference table. “The deputy secretary has called a meeting with the press to talk about our coverage of our allies, making sure it doesn’t hurt the war effort, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t understand. Isn’t there something you need me to translate?”
