Mama looked thoughtfully at her. “You did quite well today, even though you’re young for the job. Corrine could open in the mornings, and if you take the afternoon office shift, then the girls could continue with their volunteer work.” Mama nodded. “Okay, that’s a good plan. But if you find you can’t handle the office, Laura, you must tell Corrine or Ginny.”
“I can do it,” Laura said. And she felt confident that she could. She felt proud that she’d managed that afternoon, and she’d been under an enormous weight of worry then.
They divided up the other chores, with the older girls taking the biggest load, although Gary took his share. Mama packed a bag, and Dad took her back to the hospital. When he returned he looked weary, and the others gathered around him for any new word about Eddie.
“The doctor won’t be back until tomorrow, but whenever she can, Mama will call the office to report on his condition. Now we must pray for Eddie’s safety as well as Bruce’s,” Dad said.
“Oh, we have a letter from Bruce,” Laura said. “He wrote it after D-Day. I’ll be right back.” She took the key from the nail beside the door and ran to get the letter. How could she have forgotten such an important letter? It wasn’t that Eddie was more important than Bruce, but Eddie was here, and Bruce was—well, she didn’t know where Bruce was. She wished she did.
Once Laura made it back to the apartment, Dad read the letter aloud. “I think it would be best if we didn’t tell Bruce about Eddie,” he said. “Bruce has enough to worry about without us adding another burden. When Eddie is home again, then I’ll let Bruce know what the family has been going through.”
“But what should we say about Eddie? I always write Bruce what we’re doing. Won’t he think it strange if I don’t mention him?” Laura asked.
“Tell him that Eddie is playing chess with your mom. She took the chessboard to occupy him. And another thing …” He looked at each one of them for a long moment. “I’ll post a notice about Eddie’s illness on the office door. If people ask, tell them that we’ve disinfected the area and that the hotel isn’t under quarantine. We don’t want a panic situation.”
“We’ve only scrubbed our apartment,” Corrine said.
“But we’re about to work on the lobby and the stairs—the public areas. Thank the Lord that Eddie’s movements have been limited to room 24 the last two days. Not counting Laura, Eddie is the youngest in the building, and polio usually strikes children, so our renters shouldn’t worry unnecessarily. The danger of infection will be over shortly. But if you hear of anyone in the building being sick, we must alert them, in case they didn’t see the notice.”
Laura stared at her father. Without saying the words, he had told her that she was the most likely to get the disease. She felt her face. Was it hotter than normal? What were the signs? She wiggled her toes inside her shoes. They worked fine.
“Laura?”
She glanced at her dad and then at the others. Her sisters and brother had their heads bowed. She quickly bowed her own and added her fervent prayer that she, in addition to Eddie and Bruce, would be safe.
Dad wrote the notice and tacked it on the door, while the girls got mops and buckets and strong disinfecting soap and started on the stairs and lobby. Gary tackled the back staircase and mopped out room 24. Laura and Dad scrubbed the walls and floor of the hallways. They worked until nearly midnight, but when they were finished, every surface was clean.
First thing in the morning, Laura repeated her prayer for safety and checked out her legs. They worked. She hoped Eddie’s muscles had stopped trembling and were moving normally by now. With a heavy heart and the weariness of worry, Laura, along with Corrine, Ginny, and Gary, moved quietly around the hotel, doing chores.
When the time came for her afternoon shift in the office, Laura grabbed an armload of books from the low table in the living room and carried them to the office. She wanted plenty to do while she was cooped up in the small area.
The time went by pretty fast. Her best friend, Yvonne Dreger, came by, and Laura explained that Eddie was in the hospital and she was taking over the office so Mama could nurse him.
Yvonne cried when she learned Eddie had polio.
“But we think it’s a mild case, and he’ll be okay,” Laura hastily assured her. “He has to be.”
She actually felt closer to Yvonne than to her sisters, since her sisters were older. Yvonne’s brother Charlie had been killed at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, before Laura’s family bought the hotel. Yvonne hated Japs with a vengeance, and so did Laura. How could she not hate someone who had killed Yvonne’s brother? Mama told her that they should not hate, but they were at war. An enemy soldier could kill Bruce. Laura hated Germans, too, since it was more likely that Bruce was in Europe right now than in the Pacific. She wished she knew exactly where he was.
Yvonne promised to pray for Eddie and left for home. The mailman came, and Laura put the mail in the boxes and distributed it to residents who came to the office. There was no letter from Bruce, so she reread the one that had come the day before and wrote a reply. The Wakamutsus had written. She didn’t open that letter, but Ginny did when she came to the office to see how things were going.
“Sachiko moved out of the relocation center,” Ginny said, summing up the letter as she read. “She got a sponsor and a job in Chicago and was allowed to leave Wyoming. The family misses her, but they’re glad she’s no longer behind the barbed wire, like they are. The boys have organized a baseball team. That’s just like them,” she said with a smile. “They love baseball as much as Gary.”
Laura was acquainted with the Wakamutsu boys—Minoru, who was Gary’s age, and Kiyoshi, who was a year younger—but she didn’t know them well. Oh, she’d been around them when their families had Sunday dinner together occasionally, but the older boys did things like play baseball or go the movies, so she and Eddie stuck together and played by themselves. Sometimes all the older children took Laura and Eddie and walked the streets around the hotel, window-shopping at various businesses located on the edge of the international section.
Suddenly the phone rang. It was Mama reporting that Eddie’s fever was lower. That was a good sign. She didn’t mention how his legs worked, and Laura didn’t ask.
“How are you feeling, honey? Are you tired?”
So her mother was worried that Laura would get the disease.
“I’m okay. I’ve put up the mail, and most of it is out.” Laura told her about the letter from Bruce that had come the day before and the one from the Wakamutsus. “No one else is sick here,” Laura told her. She had conscientiously asked everyone who came for mail how their family members were. So far, so good.
The days fell into a pattern. By week’s end, Laura had settled into her new job. Yvonne came over in the afternoons and stayed an hour or so. She said she liked sitting in the small office, too, and might grow up to be a secretary. Mrs. Lind, who lived in apartment 8, came to the office precisely at four o’clock every day. That was when her favorite radio show ended. Every day she had a different complaint. Mama called about the same time each day to report about Eddie. The mailman maintained a fairly rigid schedule, too. No one in the building was ill, and Laura discovered each morning that all her toes and fingers worked. Maybe God was listening this time. Maybe He had been too busy listening to soldiers’ prayers to hear her prayers about Eddie not having polio.
By the beginning of the second week, Laura was desperate for new activities to pass the long hours behind the desk. She missed Eddie. She missed playing with him, going places with him, even arguing with him. Listening to the radio while she was in the office did seem to help keep her mind off Eddie, but it didn’t help her worries about Bruce.
“How’s Eddie?” Yvonne asked when she came over. “Can he move his legs yet?”
“He’s making progress,” Laura reported. That’s what Mama and Dad said. Just the night before the family had gone to the hospital to wave at him from behind the glass. This time he’d waved back, but one leg wa
sn’t gaining strength like they had hoped. She didn’t want to dwell on that and was glad when the radio program changed. “Oh, listen, it’s news time.”
As the correspondent talked, Laura wrote FRANCE in the margin of the newspaper. At supper she would relay the news she’d heard while in the office. Each night the family listened to war correspondent Edward R. Murrow report the latest battles, but first they got Laura’s report.
“I wonder if Bruce is in France,” Laura said.
“Why don’t you ask him?” Yvonne suggested.
“He can’t tell us. You know the censors would cut that out in a flash.”
“Maybe he could give you hints.”
Laura got Bruce’s latest letter out of the drawer. “He mentions mud, but that could be anywhere. Before D-Day, the censors missed his letter because he mentioned a town in England, and it wasn’t cut out. We looked it up on the map, so we knew where he was.” She opened the atlas that she’d carried down to the office and showed her friend the exact spot. Bruce had written he’d gone to a movie when he’d had a rare night off.
Yvonne tapped her finger on the map. “Do the censors read your letters to Bruce?”
“I don’t know. I could ask him where he is, but what good would that do? He can’t tell us.”
“He can’t tell you town names or country names, but what if you made up a code?”
“A code! Yvonne, you’re a genius! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that myself.”
Laura pulled a sheet of paper out of the drawer. “I think our code needs a real piece of paper.” Because of the paper shortage, they usually wrote on scrap paper, but this would be a code they could refer to every time they wrote to Bruce.
She was hungry, so she thought of food words. “For France we’ll use pie.” That was a treat they had not had since Eddie had gone into the hospital. Corrine said she was no good at making pies and had instead been saving the sugar so Mama could make a couple of them when Eddie came home.
“What about steak instead of England?” Yvonne suggested.
For the first time since Eddie had gotten sick, Laura felt excited and challenged. She eagerly set to work thinking of words for every country in Europe.
CHAPTER 3
Eddie’s Homecoming
How’s Jerry doing?” Laura asked from the office window where she was working the afternoon shift.
Maude looked up from the letter she’d just opened. “It’s hard to tell.” She held up her son’s letter. All the holes reminded Laura of the snowflakes she’d cut out for the school bulletin board last winter.
“Jerry wasn’t thinking about the censors when he wrote this one. I can’t make out a whole sentence. Listen to this. ‘We rode down to the blank where Cecil Woodall had left the truck. The tires were a foot deep in blank. We thought we’d need it for blank, but the lieutenant said we’d have to blank.’ There are more blanks in this letter than words.”
“You need the code,” Laura said and opened the desk drawer. She pulled out the code sheet that she and Yvonne had devised and handed it to Maude.
“You think this will work?” Maude asked after Laura had explained the system.
“I don’t know. It’s been three weeks since I sent it to Bruce, and we haven’t had a letter where he used it. He probably doesn’t have my letter yet.”
“I need to add code words. Jerry shipped out of Seattle. If he went to the European front, he would have sailed from back East, not from here. What can we use for Philippines or Hawaii or other island words?”
Laura opened the atlas to the Pacific Ocean, and she and Maude made a new code. They used names of flowers for the various Pacific islands and chuckled as they assigned the new words.
It felt good to laugh. There hadn’t been much to laugh about lately. Eddie was through the worst of his illness, and although Mama came home at night, she stayed at the hospital with him during the day, helping him with exercises.
The hotel was running smoothly, but the family had to work more hours to keep everything going all right. People moved from one job to another, and Dad had complained that there had been quite a turnover of workers at Boeing since war production had begun. That also meant people moved in and people moved out of the hotel, and there were more rooms to clean thoroughly.
Maude had helped a few mornings with the office so that Corrine could work in the rooms alongside the others. When Eddie came home, Mama would go back to mornings in the office when most of the checkouts occurred, and Eddie would help again in the rooms. At least, Laura hoped he would. The latest report from the hospital had not been that good, although Eddie was gaining strength day by day.
The phone rang. Laura handed the flower code sheet to Maude and reached for the receiver.
Mama’s voice held guarded excitement. “The doctor says Eddie can probably come home on Friday. He’ll still have to do his exercises, but he’ll be home.”
This was Tuesday. Three more days. Laura’s heart repeated the refrain. Three more days. Three more days. They could put up a big sign for Eddie, and maybe Corrine could bake a cake. Yvonne could come over, along with Eddie’s friend, Kenny Howell.
“I’ll tell the others,” Laura said. “How’s his leg?” One had been responding to exercises, but the other one still wasn’t doing well.
“He won’t be walking when he comes home, but maybe soon,” Mama said. “We must hope and pray for the best.”
“Any mail for me?” Mrs. Lind was at the office window, having nudged Maude aside with her large bulk, and she was demanding immediate action even though Laura was on the phone. Laura shook her head. “Well, do you have the newspaper?”
“I can hear Mrs. Lind,” Mama said. “Better take care of her. I’ll see you this evening, Laura.”
“Bye, Mama.” Laura hung up and handed the afternoon newspaper to Mrs. Lind, who never bought one of her own, but instead came down to borrow the hotel’s copy of the Seattle Times every afternoon. The first time she’d acted like she was going to take it back to her apartment, but Laura had told her she had to read it in the lobby in case someone else wanted to see it. She didn’t know if that was Mama’s policy, but Mrs. Lind just grumbled and settled herself on the low couch, so Laura figured that Mama had told her that before.
Maude moved to the window again. She was the exact opposite of Mrs. Lind. Maude looked on the positive side of everything, which she always told Laura was the sunny side and the only way to be happy. Mrs. Lind could find wrong in everything and everybody. Those two women were night and day, breakfast and supper, sweet and sour. Laura grinned at Maude and shook her head.
“Eddie will be home on Friday. Three days.”
“We must plan a homecoming party,” Maude said. “How’s his leg?”
In a sad, quiet voice, Laura recounted the little she knew.
“He shouldn’t come home too soon,” Mrs. Lind said from the couch. “He could still spread the disease.”
“No, he can’t, or the doctor wouldn’t send him home,” Laura said.
“Are you being impertinent, Laura Edwards?” Mrs. Lind asked.
“No, ma’am. I’m just saying what I think. Eddie hasn’t had a fever for some time. Mama wouldn’t bring him home if he could spread polio to the rest of us.”
“I guess he won’t be tearing around the place like he usually is.”
Laura couldn’t believe Mrs. Lind would actually say that.
“No. He can’t walk yet,” Laura said coldly.
Mrs. Lind had the grace to look flustered. “Oh, I didn’t know.”
“She couldn’t have heard what you told me,” Maude said in a low voice. “She didn’t know.”
“He’ll walk soon,” Laura said. “I know he will.”
The next day when Yvonne came for her afternoon visit, she and Laura planned Eddie’s homecoming party.
“We need a big banner,” Yvonne said. She waved her hand in the air as if reading from a large invisible sign. “WELCOME HOME, EDDIE!”
“We don’t have that much paper,” Laura said.
“What else could we use to make it?” Yvonne asked.
Laura thought a moment. Gary and Ginny’s high school had a banner made of cloth that the band carried in parades. Maybe she and Yvonne could use a sheet for the background, but Laura didn’t know of any scrap material they could use for the letters. She glanced around the office. The last few days’ newspapers were stacked in a corner, waiting to be taken to the collection site.
“Oh, we can cut letters out from these newspapers and pin them onto a sheet,” Laura said. “Then we can unpin them and use them for the paper drive.”
Yvonne drew large letters on the newsprint, and Laura cut them out with the office scissors.
She paused to read a front-page story about the Americans capturing the island of Guam. She and Maude hadn’t made a code word for Guam. They’d need to. The article summed up the war in the Pacific and mentioned in passing the horrible Bataan Death March when the Americans in the Philippines had surrendered to the Japanese more than two years ago.
“I think Neil Palmer is dead,” Laura said. “Corrine prays about him all the time, and she keeps saying he’s coming back, but I don’t think so.” If he had been captured, he’d have been forced to walk miles and miles, day after day with no food or water, and then put in a horrible prison camp. Laura didn’t think he could last through that. “I hope he died in the fighting instead of having to go through all that torture and then die.”
“He wasn’t listed in the paper,” Yvonne said and pointed to the daily column that listed names of the local men who’d been killed in the line of duty. She drew a big E on that page.
“Mama said the Japanese didn’t sign some agreement, so they won’t give out the names. That’s why he’s listed as missing. The navy doesn’t know where he is.”
“The dirty Japs,” Yvonne said through gritted teeth. Her eyes shone with tears. “I hope every one of them gets killed.” She sniffed. “Mama is okay most of the time, but yesterday she was fixing supper and she just sat down on the kitchen floor and cried. She’d been cutting up a chicken, and I asked for the wishbone, and she said when Charlie was my age, he always asked for the wishbone.”
American Triumph: 1939-1945: 4 STORIES IN 1 Page 35
