A Woman's Place

by Lynn Austin

  “Sometimes I wonder if Dirk sent me home because he wanted me to learn how to be like his mother. Maybe he hopes I’ll be the kind of wife that she is, but I know that I can’t ever be. She makes bread and soup from scratch, and the only soup I can cook is the kind that comes in a can. I thought all bread came from a bakery until I seen his mother making it.”

  “Does Dirk talk about things like that in his letters? Is he pressuring you to be more domesticated?”

  “No, and I’m afraid to bring it up. I hardly ever talk to Dirk about his parents, and I sure don’t tell him that me and his father aren’t getting along. I want to change and be the kind of person his mother is, but I can’t. I try and try and I just can’t be any different.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Rosa,” Helen said with a sigh. She wished she knew how to get rid of her.

  “Dirk is nearly finished with his corpsman training. He’s going to be shipped overseas to where the war is in March…. And I’m just so scared!”

  Helen saw Rosa’s lower lip tremble and feared that she would start crying like she had the last time. How on earth would Helen comfort her if she did? Thankfully, Thelma interrupted them as she made her way down the hall with the roaring vacuum cleaner. She shut it off in surprise when she saw the two of them near the front door.

  “I thought you left for downtown, Miss Helen.”

  “I’m on my way. Thelma, this is Rosa Voorhees. We work together at the shipyard. Rosa, this is Thelma King.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Rosa said. “Hey, Helen, if you’re going downtown, can I hitch a ride with you?”

  “If you’d like.” Helen didn’t want to know what business Rosa had in downtown Stockton. She simply wanted to drop her off somewhere and be rid of her.

  Rosa talked on and on about Dirk as she and Helen walked out to the garage, as they climbed into the car, and as they drove downtown and parked near the village hall. Helen was only half listening as she marshaled all of her arguments against the internment camp. She barely noticed that Rosa was still following her until she walked into the mayor’s office and his secretary said, “May I help you ladies?”

  “Yes, I’m Helen Kimball. I’d like to speak to Archie—Mayor Walton—if he has a moment.” She was ushered into his office a few minutes later with Rosa still tagging along behind her. The plump, balding mayor sat behind his desk with his shirtsleeves rolled up, teetering dangerously on the hind legs of his chair. He plopped forward, then stood and straightened his necktie as they entered.

  “Helen! How are you?” he asked, offering her his hand. “What brings you here on a cold Saturday morning?”

  Helen decided not to complicate matters by introducing Rosa. Who knew what that girl was likely to say? “I came because I was appalled by what I read in the newspaper this morning, Archie. A prisoner of war camp in Stockton? We simply cannot allow it.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Those German soldiers will be a danger to our community. What can we do to stop this?”

  He sighed and sank back onto his chair, gesturing to the two seats in front of his desk. “Nothing. Believe me, Helen, I already asked. That’s state-owned land out there. It’s out of my control.”

  “Couldn’t we petition someone at the state level, then? I would be happy to get the community mobilized. I’ll even take the petitions door-to-door myself if I have to.”

  “Won’t do any good. The deal has already been made over in Lansing. The state officials did promise me, though, that only common soldiers would be assigned here. No Nazi Party members, no officers, no troublemakers of any kind.”

  “Oh, come on, Archie. They’re all troublemakers.”

  “Well, I think there must be a lot of young German boys who wound up being drafted without any say in the matter. I’m sure they just want the war to end so they can go home to their families—at least, that’s what the state promised me.”

  “There are no good Nazis and bad Nazis—a German is a German!”

  He seemed taken aback by her vehemence. After a moment he said, “I appreciate your concern, but I have much bigger fish to fry. Our town has been growing so rapidly with the shipyard and all, that I can’t keep up with all the problems. Do you know our population has tripled in just one year’s time? Housing is an issue, and so is rising crime. With so many other concerns, I just don’t have time to fight this prisoner-of-war thing. If you want to do it on your own, go right ahead. And if you think of anything I can do, let me know. Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do, but my hands are tied.”

  “When is the next town board meeting?”

  He consulted his calendar. “Two weeks from today.”

  “Put this issue on the agenda. I’ll be back.” Helen stalked from his office, mumbling, “This is absolutely unacceptable. Germans are loathsome creatures…. I hate them all!”

  “Do you hate me because I’m Italian?” Rosa asked as they walked to the car. “We’re fighting Mussolini and the Italians, too.”

  “Of course not. You were born here. Those prisoners are native Germans. And I find it very hard to believe that any of them are innocent. They allowed Hitler to come to power, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Rosa seemed shocked by Helen’s fervor, too. Why wasn’t everyone outraged by the POW camp? “Where can I drop you off, Rosa? Your house?”

  “Are you going back home?”

  “No, I’m going to drive out and look at that property, see how far along the project is. Maybe it isn’t too late to stop it.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  “I suppose.” For the life of her, Helen couldn’t understand why Rosa was tagging along like her shadow. She retrieved her car, and the two of them headed out of town.

  How long had it been since she’d driven out to Stockton Lake? Helen couldn’t recall, but she did remember the hours and hours she’d spent out there with Jimmy. Memories of him seemed to be popping up, unbidden, ever since she’d started working at the shipyard. To be driving out here now under these circumstances seemed like an enormous injustice. Bringing German soldiers to Stockton was bad enough, but to let them live in the very woods that Jimmy had loved so much seemed an outrage.

  It never occurred to Helen as she drove out of town that the back roads might not be plowed. But as she turned off the county highway and saw that the private road to the lake had been cleared recently, she realized that the project had probably been well underway before the newspaper reported it. Her huge car bounced through ruts and potholes, rattling Helen’s teeth and causing Rosa to hang on to the grab bar for dear life.

  They finally pulled to a halt in a plowed area at the end of the road. Two state-owned trucks were already parked there. Beyond a half-finished barbed-wire fence, the clearing resembled a military camp with three bunkhouses, toilet buildings, an elevated waterstorage tank, and several smaller buildings, all covered with a clean blanket of snow. The only sign of life was a curl of smoke that rose from what must be the cookhouse.

  “Looks to me like it’s already built,” Rosa said.

  “They put this camp together during the Depression,” Helen told her. “It was another idiotic idea our government had. They built all this in 1933 as an emergency resettlement camp to get the bums off the streets of Chicago. The idea failed, thankfully. We didn’t want the bums hanging around our town any more than the people in Chicago did. But hoboes seem tame compared to Nazis.”

  She shut off the car engine to conserve gasoline. In the winter stillness, Helen heard the faint rustle of leafless branches, the distant call of birds. The snow lay sparkling in gentle drifts.

  “It’s real pretty out here,” Rosa said in a near whisper.

  “Yes, it is. This camp seems especially obscene to me because I used to come out here with—” She stopped. She was talking too much. Rosa didn’t need to know her personal affairs. But she had already said too much.

  “With Jimmy?” Rosa asked.

  Helen nodded
reluctantly. “I taught him how to drive out here on these roads. Of course, they were just dirt roads back then. This was always such a beautiful spot, overlooking the lake.”

  “Did you used to sit here and neck?”

  “Rosa! Honestly!”

  “Whoops. I did it again, didn’t I? Ginny says I always ask questions that are too nosy. I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  “I would be scared to sit way out here in the woods at night with wild animals and things. I’m a city girl. But it’s real pretty here in the daytime. I could see sitting here with a cute guy and … talking …”

  “I may be a spinster, Rosa, but I’m not completely ignorant of the birds and the bees. If you must know, Jimmy and I did spend time out here kissing. But we spent time talking, as well, about all sorts of things. Jimmy was a very intelligent man and he thought deeply about life.”

  Helen watched a row of clouds shift and change as they blew across the sky above the lake and remembered how much Jimmy enjoyed talking about God and his faith. He had read every book in the Stockton Library on the subjects of theology and religion—not that there were many to choose from. Helen remembered one discussion in particular as if it had happened yesterday. Jimmy had spoken with such passion as he’d talked about Jesus’ love for all the social misfits, and he was impatient with Helen’s church for not modeling Christ to the underprivileged people in town, calling it a social club, a place to dress up and be seen.

  “If I were searching for God,” he had said, “I’d be more likely to find Him out here than in your church.”

  “That’s a very pagan concept, you know,” Helen replied, “saying that God is in nature.”

  “That’s not what I mean at all, Helen. These woods are His handiwork. Creation shows us what He is like: imaginative, extravagant, generous. We can learn things about God when we study what He has made.”

  “What do you learn from the fact that wild animals attack and kill each other out here? Even the tiniest mosquito is bloodthirsty.”

  “That’s man’s fault, not God’s. Adam’s sin caused all of that. But can’t you see the order and beauty and creativity behind creation? And the love, Helen. The sheer love God displays in the blue sky and glorious clouds.”

  “The clouds also bring thunder and lightning—and floods.”

  “I used to be afraid of thunder when I was a kid, but my father would hold me in his arms so I wouldn’t be scared. I think God is like that. Bad things happen to us because we live in a fallen world. But if we have God’s arms around us, we can get through anything without being afraid.”

  “I can’t imagine crawling onto my father’s lap,” Helen said, “much less having him comfort me.”

  “Maybe that’s why you see God the way you do. In your mind He’s like your father: controlling, stern, someone whose favor you need to earn.”

  “I can’t help it,” she sighed. “God does things that I honestly can’t understand—like allowing all of my siblings to die.”

  “My mother suffered from consumption for as long as I can remember,” Jimmy said. “That’s why I quit school—to help earn money for doctors and sanitariums and medicine. But when she died a few years ago, I didn’t blame God. Death is a consequence of Adam’s sin. It’s part of living in a fallen world. Yet Jesus says we should look after the sick and the needy if we’re His people. Take care of the orphans and the poor. I think maybe He allows all these tragedies to happen in our lives to give us a chance to show others His love.”

  Helen was remembering the intent look in Jimmy’s dark eyes, the passion in his voice, when Rosa interrupted her thoughts.

  “You been quiet an awful long time. Did I say something wrong again?”

  “No, you didn’t say anything wrong.”

  Helen sighed. Why had this mixed-up, misplaced girl come to her of all people? Could it be as simple as Jimmy made it sound? Had a misfit like Rosa come into Helen’s life to give her a chance to put Jimmy’s words into practice? If so, then Helen was failing miserably, acting just as stern and unloving as her own father had. She viewed Rosa through the same ungracious lenses that her father had viewed Jimmy.

  “I was just remembering some things, Rosa.”

  “About him? About Jimmy?”

  “Yes. And wishing I could talk with him just one more time.”

  “I know what you mean,” Rosa said in a teary voice. “Sometimes I’m so afraid that I’ll never see Dirk again…. If anything ever happened to him, I don’t know what I would do.”

  For the first time all morning, Helen really heard what Rosa was saying. It didn’t matter why she had chosen to come to Helen, or why she had been following her all over town; Rosa had come to Helen with her loneliness and fear—and that was all that mattered. Helen turned to Rosa and looked into her beautiful, sorrowful eyes and suddenly knew exactly what advice to give. “Is there some way you could see Dirk before he ships off?”

  “I wish I could. We been talking about it in our letters, but he won’t get enough time off on his furlough. It would take so long to get here from Virginia that by the time he did, he’d have to turn right around the next day and go back. They need him overseas really bad, as soon as his training is finished.”

  “Can’t you go to Virginia to see him?”

  “I want to, but won’t I lose my job? I don’t think they’d give me that much time off to travel and everything, would they? And if I just up and went, I’d be afraid they wouldn’t let me come back to work again. I couldn’t stand to be at Dirk’s house all day with nothing to do. I suppose I could go to New York and live with my mother, but—”

  “Let’s talk to Jean on Monday and see if she can arrange a leave of absence for you. The other girls and I will work extra hours if we have to. If we skip lunch every day, the three of us can put in three extra hours of work.”

  Rosa’s eyes swam with tears. “You’d really do that for me?”

  “Of course. I think it’s important that you see Dirk before he ships off.”

  “That would be a dream come true! I’d give anything to see Dirk again.”

  Helen turned away and started the engine, worried that Rosa might try to embrace her. “I can’t promise you, Rosa, but I’ll do my best to make it happen.” She would also talk to Jean and Mr. Seaborn about hiring Thelma King.

  Helen realized that she was breaking all her own rules again, getting involved in other people’s lives. But as they drove back into town, she had a feeling that Jimmy would applaud her for it.

  Rosa was so excited about going to see Dirk that she seemed to bounce on the car seat without any help from the ruts and potholes. Helen dropped her off at Dirk’s house, a very different girl from the woebegone Rosa who had shown up on her doorstep two hours ago. Once again, Helen thought about Jimmy and wondered if things would have been different if she could have seen him one last time.

  The mansion sparkled when she returned home and smelled wonderfully of lemon oil. Thelma was rubbing it into the railing and banisters in the front hallway.

  “How’d you make out with them German prisoners, Miss Helen?”

  “Not very well, I’m afraid. By the way, are you married, Thelma?” She had no idea what had made her ask that question.

  “No, but I have a boyfriend. We plan on getting married soon as he comes home. He got drafted into the army.”

  “I suppose the draft gets every man, sooner or later, rich or poor …”

  Even rich men like Helen’s fiancé, Albert Jenkins. The memory came back to Helen as clearly as if she were watching it on film. She had been standing right here in the front foyer the day Albert came to tell her that he’d been drafted. America had just entered the Great War.

  “I came over to ask you what you thought, Helen,” Albert had said. “Should we move up our wedding date or wait?”

  “Let’s wait.”

  She hadn’t even taken time to think it over, and she saw that her quick response had hurt him. Worse, she
had probably looked relieved. The world was at war, the future was uncertain, and Albert must have hoped she would say, “Let’s get married right now!” It would have been the natural response if she had loved him.

  “May I ask you something?” he said gently. “Is it true what you told your father the night we talked about our engagement—that you’re in love with someone else?”

  She looked away, staring into the dreary parlor where all her siblings’ coffins had lain, one right after the other. “It was true,” she replied. “I was in love. But it’s over now.”

  “What happened?”

  “What difference does it make, Albert?”

  He rested his hand on her shoulder. “We’re engaged to be married, Helen. Don’t you think I have a right to know?”

  “It never would have worked between Jimmy and me,” she said with a sigh. “Our backgrounds were too different. He lived a simple life. I’m well-off, educated …” She played with the topaz engagement ring Albert had given her, an heirloom from his grandmother.

  He lifted her chin so they faced each other. “Are you still in love with him?”

  “Albert, I’m sorry…. I met him long before I met you. People can’t help who they fall in love with.”

  “I want to know what really happened between the two of you. I think you owe me that much.” When she didn’t reply, he asked, “Did it have something to do with your father?”

  Helen nodded. “My father disapproved of him. He said I had to choose between my family and Jimmy. He vowed to disown me if we married. I told him I didn’t care about his money, and I didn’t. But then he said that if we ran off it would kill my mother—and I was afraid he was right. I’m the only child she has…. Jimmy didn’t want me to have to make that decision, so he left.”

  Albert was silent for a long moment, gazing at her. The clock on the mantel in the parlor ticked loudly. Helen hoped she hadn’t hurt his feelings.

  “It sounds to me like your father ended the relationship, not you,” he finally said.

  “My parents had seven children. All of them are dead except me.”