FINN ACCEPTED HENRY BARRETT’S job offer at Electric Boat and the family moved to Groton, Connecticut, a seaside town near Mystic. They stayed on the farm until the end of the harvest in October, until the last of the wheat had been reaped and the potatoes were in the root cellar and the corn was in the crib. Finn was initially hired as their business operations manager, but soon got promoted to vice president and chief strategy officer. They bought a house in the center of Mystic and a summer home on nearby Mason’s Island. Finn’s office windows in Groton overlooked the water, and every day at lunch he took a walk on the marina.
Like Finn, the country slowly but surely got to its feet, even before the war. Though the Dow Jones continued to hover around the lowly 120, employment was up, production was up, consumer confidence, retail sales, house values were all on the rise.
Walter never made it out of Hampton. He died of congestive heart failure a month before they moved. “I want my tombstone to say, I bought the farm,” Walter said on his deathbed. “I’ve never been happier in my life than the four years I spent here.”
Finn kept the property in his family and rented it out to tenant farmers who took good care of it. They cultivated all five acres, feeding themselves and selling their produce to the surrounding towns, and bred their own animals: cows, chickens, goats, even horses.
Eleanor and Bertie’s marriage lasted all of five minutes. Eleanor moved to Mystic with Monty and they lived with Lucy in Finn and Vanessa’s guest cottage. After Eleanor divorced in Hampton, she remarried in Groton, divorced in Portland, Maine, and got engaged again in Providence, Rhode Island. Monty went to Harvard and then to war—command sergeant major, designation: sharpshooter, in the Big Red One. He died in Okinawa in 1945.
Finn bought his mother and father a house a block from him, so they could come over any time they wanted. The house had a small yard where they grew eggplant and tomatoes. A few times a week, Earl biked five miles to Groton to meet Finn for lunch, and together father and son enjoyed a walk along the water.
Slowly, Finn and Vanessa adapted to their new life. Finn liked the submarines and the sea. He and Vanessa made new friends, had cookouts, spent their anniversaries in New York City. They had two more children, both girls, Charlotte born in 1937, and Emily in 1939. Mae was nearly seventeen and Junie sixteen when their last sister arrived. Vanessa was forty.
When World War II broke out, Electric Boat, the only company to build submarines for the United States Navy since 1899, went from a small struggling business that built a few submersible ships and some merchant vessels to a multi-billion-dollar corporation. The Electric Boat shares Earl Evans had given his son as a graduation present jumped in price by 5000 percent through the Depression years and the war.
Lucas remained in Florida from where he wrote and called, begging Finn to move down south. “What a wonderful life it is here,” he wrote at the end of every letter, said at the end of every phone call.
After the family left for Connecticut, Finn lost touch with Schumann and Nate.
For many years he mourned her. He walked around the edges of his life as what he was, a man who had suffered a loss from which he could not recover. He felt removed from everything. Nothing had any meaning.
Little by little Finn took hold of himself. He couldn’t stand to see the disenchantment on Vanessa’s face when she looked at him. That’s not what Finn wanted to be—a disappointment to his wife. He found the relief inside himself: he remembered the war. From a box among his personal belongings, he pulled out a bundled sheaf of Vanessa’s old letters, the ones she wrote to him when he was convalescing in Italy, and re-read them. They were emotional, funny, deeply loving. He remembered how much they had meant to him, how they revived him when he had been at his lowest. They had the same effect on him now. She had scented every paper with her delicate perfume, and though faint, it was still there, and each time he inhaled, he remembered the love he had felt for her then. She was his only comfort after losing Travis. And so Finn set about rebuilding his life on the faded memory of the love he once felt for Vanessa. He brought her letters out into the open, and into the small wooden box where the letters had been he set down his grief everlasting and closed the lid and buried it in a far-away corner of his house.
We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
Eleven years passed.
In the middle of one night in the summer of 1946 Finn opened his eyes, awakened by unbearable dreams. He was in a winter field and came upon Isabelle’s children buried up to their chests in the frozen earth. They reached out their arms to him and he stretched out his hand and woke up touching nothing but thawed-out air.
He sat bolt upright in bed and gasped.
“Oh my God!” Finn said. “She lied.”