I Gave My Heart to Know This: A Novel

by Ellen Baker

Overview

Ellen Baker is beloved for crafting intimate domestic stories that resonate deeply with readers. In I Gave My Heart to Know This, the award-winning author returns with a sweeping multigenerational saga of the searing power of war, memory, friendship, and family.

In January 1944, Grace Anderson, Lena Maki, and Lena’s mother, Violet, have joined the growing ranks of women working for the war effort. Though they find satisfaction in their jobs at a Wisconsin shipyard, it isn’t enough to distract them from the anxieties of wartime, or their fears for the men they love: Lena’s twin brother, Derrick, and Grace’s high school sweetheart, Alex. When shattering news arrives from the front, the lives of the three women are pitched into turmoil. As one is pushed to the brink of madness, the others are forced into choices they couldn’t have imagined—and their lives will never be the same.

More than five decades later, Violet’s great-granddaughter, Julia, returns to the small farmhouse where Violet and Lena once lived. Listless from her own recent tragedy, Julia begins to uncover the dark secrets that shattered her family, eventually learning that redemption—and love—can be found in the most unexpected places.

Beautifully written and profoundly moving, I Gave My Heart to Know This is a riveting story of loyalties held and sacred bonds broken; crushing loss and enduring dreams; and what it takes—and what it means—to find the way home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679643944
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/02/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ellen Baker is author of Keeping the House, which won the 2008 Great Lakes Book Award. She has worked as a bookseller and event coordinator at an independent bookstore. She lives in Minnesota.

Read an Excerpt

Part One

Work


January 1944 Grace Anderson stepped out into the biting wind, clutching her father’s old lunch box. In the muted light of nearing dawn, the Superior Shipbuilding Company’s vast parking lot was so full that some latecomers’ cars were half on snowbanks, tilting at precarious angles, and the men emerging from them were sheepish or angry or chuckling, and other men were joshing them, the sounds carry- ing across the stillness as if across water. She heard the far-off banging of metal on metal, the creaking of cables, the screaming of machinery—the night shift finishing up as the day shift came on.

She saw Violet and Lena Maki, the mother and daughter who’d started as welders the same day as Grace last November, getting out of their neighbor’s truck; they made the long journey to town every day from their farm. She waved, but they didn’t see her. Not surprising, in this crowd of shadowy men in their dark wool coats, scruffy pants and boots, with pin-on buttons on their hats—member local no. 117; boilermakers and shipbuilders; solidarity. Grace’s muscles ached against her heavy clothes as she merged with the mass, moving toward the gates. She’d been working here only two months, but the smells of smoke and metal and worn-too-often-too-long clothes, the sounds of lunch boxes thunking against legs and boots crunching on packed snow seemed eternally familiar. Ahead, floodlights brightened the skeleton of a four-story-tall ocean­going cargo ship, the nearly completed hull of another in the opposite slip, the cranes hulking above both. In the farthest slip was a just-christened frigate with its sleek, pointed bow, proud superstructure, and low, flat stern—Grace’s favorite. The Coast Guard crew took this ship on near-daily test runs on Lake Superior; she would soon be heading for Lake Michigan, the Illinois Canal, down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and, from there, anywhere in the world.

Grace turned up her collar against the wind, thinking what a far cry this life was from what she’d dreamed.

But she laughed when she caught sight of Boots Dahlquist unfolding her six-foot frame from underneath a blanket on the floor of a Ford V8—Boots lived across the harbor in Duluth, Minnesota, and the fellows she carpooled with had elected her to hide out to save on tolls when they crossed the bridge to Wisconsin. “Worth the nickel, Boots?” Grace called.

“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Boots said, unkinking her back.

Grace saw Lena hurrying toward them, cutting against the grain of the foot traffic. “Grace, I’ve got something to show you,” she called, and she was clutching a piece of paper in her gloved hand, waving it above her head.

The cold made Grace’s smile slow motion. “A surprise? You didn’t have to, kid.” When Grace had first met Lena, she’d worried that the girl’s billiard-cue wrists might break under the strain of the job, but she’d quickly learned how stubborn Lena was. She and Boots had started teasing that Lena’s bones were made of steel. “If you break, we won’t worry—we’ll just weld you back together!” Lena’s mother, Violet, didn’t seem to think that was funny, but there wasn’t much that she did.

Lena reached them, her pale skin flushed, her eyes the color of a low winter sky. When she smiled, her nose dipped like a divining rod. “I got a letter,” she said, and her voice was the chirping of a bird being carried away on a strong breeze. “From Derrick.”

Grace and Boots let out automatic groans. Lena and Violet often discussed Lena’s twin brother’s evidently limitless merits—one of the few subjects on which daughter and mother agreed.

Lena stamped her foot and pointed with a gloved finger at the text. “I sent him a picture of the four of us, and he wants to meet you! I mean, write to you.”

Grace was trying to shield her face from the wind. “For Pete’s sake, Lena, it’s cold out here. Let’s not just stand here.”

“He says, ‘She’s every bit as pretty as you described, and if she’s as sweet and funny as you say, I sure would like to hear from her, if she wouldn’t mind helping “boost the morale” of a poor, lonely sailor, sniff, sniff.’”

“Morale!” Boots said. “Now you’re in for it!” Everyone knew that any girl who refused to do her part to boost a serviceman’s “morale” was not only heartless but practically handing victory to the enemy.

Lena was serious. “He’s just joking with that ‘sniff, sniff,’ part, he’s got plenty of pen pals, but you’re from home, Hollywood.”

Lena had come up with Grace’s nickname supposedly because she looked “just like” the movie star Lana Turner, but since Grace imagined the real reason was that she always wore red lipstick and black mascara to work, it was a reminder not only that she hadn’t been blessed with Lena’s flawless pale skin and shadow-casting long eyelashes but also of the dream she’d deferred of going to Hollywood to become a costume designer. “Forget it, Lena. You know I have a boyfriend.”

“Alex Kowalski, Mr. East High 1942,” Boots supplied.

“Very funny,” Grace said. Her friends had given her a hard time because she’d draped her work locker with pink organdy and pasted up photos of Alex in all his uniforms—Marine, baseball, ­basketball—as well as of him and Grace together at the spring dance, graduation. “This isn’t high school, Hollywood,” Lena had scoffed, while Boots laughed and Violet frowned. “You’ve got to admit the place needed a little dressing up,” Grace had shot back, thinking there was no reason for anyone to be jealous. Alex’s pictures were nice to look at, but she hadn’t seen him in a year and a half. She still wrote him daily, but she didn’t tell him much. It wouldn’t do to complain about the cold weather and hard work of the shipyard to a boy who was off living in mud and mosquitoes, fighting a war.

Lena handed Grace a snapshot from the envelope. “Derrick’s the one on the right.” Two sailors in work dungarees squinted into the sun. Derrick, shorter and leaner than the other fellow, with light blond hair and a straight nose like Lena’s, leaned all his weight on his right foot and tilted his head with a just-perceptible smile, as if he was on the verge of asking the prettiest girl in the room to dance.

Written on the back was: Me and Grabowski in Calif. sun getting ready for our next big “starring roles,” Dec. 1943. Note authentic-looking “sweat.”

Lena said, “They’re in California, training in the desert.”

“Well, I guess I don’t need to hear about it, when I’ll be there soon enough,” Grace said, shoving the snapshot to Lena as Violet approached.

“Oh, Derrick’s picture!” Violet said, smiling. Grace didn’t know how Violet always managed to look like she’d just stepped off a propaganda poster, her pants and even her wool jacket pressed and clean, her boots shiny, the red bandanna covering her hair as bright as a rose. “He looks just like his father looked when he was young,” she said, her mouth relaxing into its typical frown. She’d made no secret of her anger at her husband, Jago, who’d signed Derrick’s enlistment papers so Derrick could go into the Navy at age seventeen, last summer. They hadn’t told Violet until it was done. “Except that Derrick actually is as nice a boy as he looks.”

Grace started again toward the gates, rubbing her face with her free hand. “Are we standing in this wind for our health?”

“I don’t see why you’d ever want to go to California,” Lena said, catching up. “You might be something special around here, but, out there, girls like you are going to be a dime a dozen, honestly.”

“Thanks, kid.”

“I just mean, you think dull old Alex is what ‘home’ means, but what if you met someone from here you liked better? Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to have a new pen pal.”

Behind them, Boots whistled; Lena must have given her the picture. “I’d say it wouldn’t hurt one bit. You do realize he’s not really a movie star, though, right, Gracie?”

Violet laughed; sure, she’d think this was funny, of all things.

“Alex isn’t dull, Lena,” Grace said, her stomach tightening. “I don’t know why you even bothered telling your brother about me.”

“Well, we like to know everything that’s going on with each other, so of course I told him all about you, and now he wants you to write to him, and I just want him to be happy. Would it hurt you to do it?”

Just what Grace needed: another boy to tie her to this town. ­Obviously, he was only in California because the Navy had sent him there. Even worse, he was a farm boy, short, and too young ­besides—just eighteen, compared to her almost twenty. “You never know.”

“Derrick wouldn’t hurt you,” Lena said. “Never. Besides, I bet he’d tell you everything about California, and you’d find out it isn’t nearly as great as what you think.”

Interviews

Dear Reader,

When I set out to become a novelist, I didn’t realize the corners it would make me turn, the things it would teach me: how to weld a ship together, live aboard an aircraft carrier – even butcher a chicken. It’s not so surprising that in the process of writing an historical novel I’d learn a few facts. What I didn’t expect at all was that the same process would challenge and guide me through my own explorations of some of the questions my characters encounter: how (and whether) to tame or feed or foster your most outrageous dreams; how to accept unacceptable loss; how to know when it’s time to let go, and then how to do it. My new novel, I Gave My Heart to Know This, is the story of three women who work as welders at a shipyard during World War II and the tragedy that binds them, even as it divides them. Years later, a great-granddaughter, caring for the family home, pieces together the friends’ long-buried secrets, and learns the difficulties – and the possibilities – of forgiveness.

I began by poring over shipyard newsletters, photographs, blueprints. I interviewed some old-timers who told me “the way it really was.” I read about everything from naval battles to copper mining to photography to rheumatic fever, explored the engine room of a great ship, stood under the spire of a church. I spent a lot of time in archives. One of the best sources I found was a twenty-page, handwritten account of shipyard work by a woman who was a welder. I borrowed several incidents from her amazing descriptions, including an incident when she was standing in a rowboat welding on the side of a ship and leaned too far forward in her heavy welding garb. Her foreman grabbed her, saving her life; if she’d fallen in the water, she’d have sunk straight to the bottom. (The dangers of the job were many, and, to us in the modern OSHA-regulated world, almost inconceivable.)

Then came my favorite part: translating what I’d gleaned into the experience of fiction. How would it feel to make an overhead weld, sparks raining down, in a space so narrow the smoke chokes you? To fall in love with someone you’d “met” only in a letter? To carry an undeniable sense of patriotic and familial duty, alongside your dream of a different life? And then, to try to understand how your best efforts to save precious things might instead have been complicit in their loss.

Next, I developed a mystery. Time passes; things which are broken and missing long to be fixed and found. And there’s an old house with a seeming incontrovertible will of its own that holds the clues, and maybe the answers – if only someone will look.

Pinned to the wall of the attic of this house is a map of the world, with a red X marking “home.” Early on, the children play a pirate game, searching for buried treasure – and perhaps, it comes to seem, the treasure is their home – problematically. I thought a great deal about that map as I wrote: not only the meanings it has for my characters, but how comforting it would be if only I had such a map to write by. Instead, I learned that journeys are best guided by curiosity and desire and a willingness to be taken far – and that the best discoveries are often the things you didn’t know you were seeking.

Best wishes,
Ellen Baker

Editorial Reviews

Advance praise for I Gave My Heart to Know This

“Ellen Baker’s novel is large in the best sense: large in its generous spirit, and in its gallery of vivid, memorable characters. It possesses, as well, an abundance of intelligence, and great shrewdness in its pure story-telling appeal. This novel has a naturalness and finesse that are truly rare.”—Richard Ford

“What a rich offering this is! Ellen Baker gives us characters who are so real, so recognizable, so likable, in spite of (or perhaps because of) their problems and secrets and frustrations and missteps, and she presents them against a story line that is epic in scope. We move from you-are-there scenes of watching young women work in the shipyards during World War II, to the unraveling of long-held mysteries in the present day. I really loved reading this powerful and poignant book, which, though it acknowledges pain, regret and remorse, ultimately is a celebration of life.”—Elizabeth Berg, author of Once Upon a Time, There Was You and Open House
 
“A great big rich and romantic slice of World War II history that chronicles the lives of three Wisconsin women left behind on the home front to carry on without the men they love. It is a loving tribute to their courage, the sacrifices they made, and their tremendous contributions to the American war effort.”—Fannie Flagg, author of I Still Dream About You
 
“Give your heart to Ellen Baker’s beautifully made new novel about stern people and the stern toll of urgent words never said. From the hard-bitten bluffs of Lake Superior to the coast of California, from World War II to the present day, the mothers and daughters of two Midwestern families of immigrant stock race against time and history to break down a wall of lies, before it is too late.”—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean
 
“I adored this luscious novel. Its authentic details immersed me in the world of women at work during World War II, but the layered story immersed me even deeper in the secrets that get buried in generations of family history.  I ached with regret for the characters, wept at their redemption, and savored every surprising turn.”—Katrina Kittle, author of The Kindness of Strangers and The Blessings of the Animals
 
“Ellen Baker is a brilliant writer, and I Gave My Heart to Know This is a marvelous novel. Moving between past and present, the book weaves Baker’s themes of secrecy, betrayal, and forgiveness into a powerful, unforgettable story.  I loved the characters so completely I began to think of them as my own family and friends.”—Bev Marshall, author of Walking Through Shadows
 
Praise for Ellen Baker’s Keeping the House, winner of the 2008 Great Lakes Book Award for fiction and was one of the Chicago Tribune’s Best Books of the Year
 
“A great big juicy family saga, a romantic page-turner with genuine characters written with a perfect sense of history, time, and place.”—Fannie Flagg
 
“An author who knows how to keep us turning the pages.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“American fiction just doesn’t get any better than this.”—The Buffalo News
 
“Fascinating . . . a fun and fast read.”—The Stanford Daily
 
“A crackerjack debut.”—Fredericksburg Free Lance–Star
 
“A majestic, vibrant multigenerational saga.”—Booklist

From the Publisher