A Woman's Place

by Lynn Austin

  “That’s none of your business!” He infuriated her, yet she felt powerless to push him aside and leave. His voice, his calm manner, and the way his gentle eyes held hers seemed to have a hypnotic effect that she couldn’t break.

  “Someone I loved also died in that war,” he continued. “Not in the fighting, but in the time of starving that followed. My wife and our small son, Heinrich, died of disease and not enough food to eat. Our conquerors did not care. They demanded our money and our food and our land in punishment for starting the war. And so when Adolf Hitler comes with his promises and lies, my country—myself—we all follow him. It is because of our bitterness that we want revenge. You see where this bitterness has led the whole world, Miss Kimball?”

  When she didn’t reply, Meinhard continued. “That is why I ask you to forgive me. If you do, it will bring the bitterness to an end. It will bring freedom. I wish I had known this much sooner. I never saw it until Kristallnacht, when my people turned all their anger against the Jewish people, destroying homes and businesses and synagogues. The week of broken glass, they called it. I am sickened by it. I see my Jewish neighbors being ridiculed, beaten, killed. And I am thinking, ‘that is somebody’s wife, somebody’s child.’ I understand them because of my own wife and child. And that is when I know this bitterness must end.

  “When this second war begins, they make me become part of it against my will. But the first chance I have, I lift my arms in surrender.” He raised his arms in the air to demonstrate. “Enough! Enough bitterness. Enough fighting. I could no longer fight with God. And you see, He is the One that I was most angry with.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” she said in a trembling voice.

  Meinhard shook his head. “I have met people who truly do not believe in God, and they feel no anger when they see suffering. They are indifferent to it. But you and I are angry. Anger is not indifference. I blamed God because He took my family—but I couldn’t get revenge from God, so I turned my rage against other people. I wanted revenge. Someone must pay!”

  “You’re wrong,” Helen said, wanting desperately to believe that he was. “I told you, I no longer believe in God.”

  “Then why are you so angry with Him?” His eyes were so sorrowful that Helen had to look away. She was unable to reply. “You blame me and my country for your losses, Miss Kimball, and I blame you and your country. But you and I are people, not countries. Did you kill my wife? My child? Would you put a gun to their heads and shoot them or take away all of their food and watch them die? No. Of course not. Neither would I kill someone you love if I met him face-to-face. Wars come from bitterness and hatred. They are started by nations without faces. But wars end, the hatred ends, in the hearts of people like you and me. That is why I ask you to please forgive me.”

  Helen didn’t want to think too long or too hard about what Meinhard was saying. She groped for something to say, desperate to divert him from this terrible, painful subject. “When you came here to work,” she said, “when you took this job, you stole it from a woman who needed it—a woman who deserved it. She happens to be a Negro. But what do you care? You Germans believe in the so-called ‘Master Race.’ You believe that Negroes are inferior.”

  “I do not believe that,” he said flatly. “My Bible tells me that Jesus looks inside our hearts, not at the color of our skin. But please believe me, Miss Kimball. I did not know about this woman. I am sorry for taking her job…. If I make it up to her—and to you—then will you forgive me?”

  “What do you care if I forgive you or not?”

  “God has forgiven me for all the wrongs in my past. He even forgave me for being angry with Him. I want to thank Him by living the best way that I can from now on. I want to make peace with my enemies. I know that you think of me as an enemy … and so I ask you once again to please forgive me, Miss Kimball.”

  Helen slowly shook her head. To answer otherwise would have been a lie. “You ask too much,” she said softly.

  Meinhard closed his eyes and quietly stepped aside, allowing Helen to pass. As Ginny and Jean followed her up the ladder, she was ashamed to realize that they had heard every word. She punched the time clock and bolted from the building without another word to anyone.

  When she arrived home, Helen turned on the radio to distract herself, then spent a half hour scrubbing a perfectly clean kitchen sink—anything to avoid thinking about Meinhard Kesler’s words. While she scrubbed, she heard a news report telling how American forces had invaded the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific and was reminded of Rosa’s husband. He was stationed out there somewhere. Helen knew the terrible pain and loss that girl would experience if anything happened to Dirk, and once again bitterness toward her enemies blazed in Helen’s heart like a furnace. She quickly turned off the radio.

  Kesler was wrong. She wasn’t angry with God—she didn’t believe in God. And why should Helen forgive Meinhard or the Germans or anyone else? He had no right to ask such a thing.

  Helen made herself some supper, skimmed through the newspaper, then went upstairs to bed an hour earlier than usual. She couldn’t sleep. She found a book to read and curled up in her bedroom chair, desperate to forget Meinhard Kesler and Dirk Voorhees and Jimmy Bernard, desperate to silence all of her raging thoughts.

  She awoke at dawn, stiff and cramped from falling asleep in the chair. She nearly called in sick for the first time since she’d started working at Stockton Shipyard but decided not to. She refused to give Kesler the satisfaction of knowing that his words had affected her. Even so, she dreaded facing him.

  As soon as Helen reached her crew’s workstation, she sensed that something was wrong. Jean was missing, and her clipboard, which always posted their daily work orders, wasn’t hanging in its usual place. “What’s going on?” Helen asked when Jean finally emerged from a meeting in Mr. Seaborn’s office.

  “Management is scrambling to issue new work orders. All of the German prisoners quit—just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “The warden can’t force them to work here, because it’s supposed to be voluntary. But every last one of them refused to come back. Meinhard is their spokesman and he wouldn’t give a reason why.”

  Helen’s heart speeded up. She knew the reason. Then she realized what else this might mean. “Is Thelma King finally going to work with us?”

  “Earl went to get her. She’s on her way right now.” Jean smiled in triumph, and Helen couldn’t help smiling along with her. Finally justice was being done!

  Helen was still euphoric when Mr. Seaborn brought Thelma to the harness shop where Ginny, Jean, and Helen were working. Thelma seemed to glow as she took her place alongside Helen to assemble her first wire harness.

  “I don’t know how I can ever thank you, Miss Helen,” she said.

  Helen brushed her thanks aside. “Nonsense. I had nothing to do with it. You earned the right to work here.”

  “But I know that you and Mr. Seaborn and Miss Erickson were all fighting for me. You have no idea how hard it is for us colored folk. We have to fight for things that come so easy to you—like getting a good job and earning decent pay. I’ll be able to help out my family now—and maybe I can start saving up to buy us a house after the war.”

  “Are you married, Thelma?” Ginny asked.

  “No, not yet. My boyfriend’s in the navy. He’s stationed in San Francisco for now.”

  “And the armed forces are still segregated, aren’t they,” Helen said bitterly. “They were segregated in the Great War, too. How many years ago was that? Twenty-five? And nothing has changed in all that time.”

  “Oh, I know there will be plenty more battles to fight before colored people get a fair chance, Miss Helen. But at least we won this fight. And you all helped. I don’t know how I can ever thank you.”

  It wasn’t until Helen was driving home that afternoon that she realized the unspoken bargain she had made with Meinhard Kesler. He had quit. He’d convinced all of the others to quit. And now she would have to admit that she’d
been wrong about him. She would have to forgive him. She felt the nugget of bitterness burning inside her at the thought of him and knew that she wasn’t ready to do it. She had nourished that blackened trophy for twenty-five years, shaping it and polishing it until it glittered like a diamond. What would fill its place if she let it go?

  Could Meinhard be right about God, too? Would she be this angry with Him if she didn’t believe in Him? Helen parked the car in the garage and slammed the door on her way out. Those were questions she refused to think about.

  CHAPTER 32

  * Rosa *

  Rosa clapped her hands until they stung. She would have put her fingers in her teeth and whistled, but she’d never heard anyone else whistle in church and figured it probably wasn’t allowed. But seeing all those little kids dressed up as Mary and Joseph and the wise men, and hearing them sing Christmas songs like “Away in a Manger” and “Silent Night,” had been just about the cutest thing she’d ever watched.

  She felt her unborn baby kicking her in the ribs and she rubbed her tummy, smiling to herself. Yeah, you’ll be singing up there with all the others in a few years, just you wait. She turned to Ginny and Jean, who were seated in the pew with her.

  “Wasn’t that the cutest thing? Didn’t Patty’s boys make darling shepherds?”

  Ginny nodded, blowing her nose.

  “They did great,” Jean agreed, “especially after we took away their shepherd’s crooks so they’d quit whacking each other with them.”

  “Do we get cookies now?” Ginny’s son Herbie asked. Her boys had come to the Christmas program that evening, too, to see Jean’s nephews perform.

  “Refreshments are downstairs in the church hall,” Jean told them. “You can run on ahead and we’ll meet you there.”

  “She doesn’t really mean ‘run,”’ Ginny said, grabbing Allan’s shirttail. “Remember your manners.” The boys took off at a fast walk, and Ginny helped Rosa to her feet. The doctor had said the baby might come anytime, but meanwhile it was getting harder and harder for her to stand up again once she was seated.

  “Uff! Thanks, Ginny. This kid has really been … what’s that funny word you’re always using lately?”

  “You mean burgeoning?” Ginny laughed. “I think you’re the one who has been burgeoning out, Rosa.”

  “Well, I just want this kid out! I don’t care if he burgeons or not.” Rosa felt so happy to be with her friends from work again that she would have danced if she could have. She’d missed Jean and Ginny this past month. And Helen, too. “Gee, I sure wish Helen would have come. Then we’d all be together again. I guess she didn’t want to come to church because she doesn’t believe in God. But how can anyone not believe in God?”

  “Maybe it’s because of all the losses in her life,” Jean said. “I can’t imagine losing all of my siblings.”

  Ginny linked her arm through Rosa’s as they followed the chattering crowd downstairs to the church hall. “People sometimes have a hard time understanding God when they’re hurt,” Ginny said. “They can’t understand why He would let them suffer so much pain.”

  “Ginny and I overheard someone talking to Helen about this at work,” Jean said. “He told Helen that deep down she knows God still exists, but she’s angry with Him.”

  “And maybe we’d be angry with Him, too,” Ginny added, “if someone we loved died. Jean and I came to the conclusion that the man Helen loved must have died in the first war. What was his name?”

  “Jimmy,” Rosa said. “She never did tell me what happened to Jimmy—just that they went their separate ways. And I couldn’t find out because you made me stop asking nosy questions, remember? But I always figured he must have died in the war, and that’s why Helen hates Germans so much.”

  “It would explain a lot,” Jean agreed.

  Rosa gripped the railing as she made her way down the narrow stairs. What if God took Dirk from her the same way? It was a question she tried hard not to think about because it always made her insides feel like somebody was twisting them in knots. To be honest, she would probably hate the Japanese for the rest of her life. But would she stop believing in God? All you had to do was look up at the stars at night or at a baby’s face to know God existed.

  Downstairs, the church hall was as loud and rowdy as a beer joint. Dozens of overexcited children, including Patty’s two oldest boys, chased each other around the room in circles while their Sunday school teachers tried in vain to calm them down. The line for coffee and cookies reached to the bottom of the stairs.

  “I’m too beat to wait in line,” Rosa told the girls. “How about if you go ahead, and I’ll save us a table.” She sank into the nearest chair with a sigh.

  “Do you want coffee or punch?” Jean asked.

  Rosa’s stomach rolled at the thought. “Neither one, thanks.” She watched the swirl of activity while she waited and imagined Dirk as a little boy running around like all the others. The little girl who’d played Mary was tossing her baby Jesus doll into the air and catching him again. Two little wise men fought over one of the fake gifts they had brought to the baby. Rosa wondered if Dirk had ever played the part of a wise man or a shepherd. Tena had shown her pictures of him all dressed up for church, his blond hair nearly white in the sunlight as he grinned at the camera.

  “Is that story really true that they told in the play tonight?” Rosa asked Jean when she and Ginny returned with their coffee and cookies. “Did God really send His Son as a little baby?”

  “It’s absolutely true,” Jean replied.

  Rosa frowned. “But all that other stuff about Him being born in a barn with sheep and cows—that part isn’t true.”

  “Yes, it is,” Jean insisted. “The Bible says that Mary had to use a feeding trough for Jesus’ crib.”

  “But if Jesus was really God, wouldn’t He have been born someplace nice?”

  Jean shook her head. “If He had been born as a king in a palace, then the shepherds and the common people never would have been able to get near Him. But anyone can visit a stable. Jesus came for all people, so He had to come from a simple background that everyone could relate to.”

  “But the shepherds wouldn’t have come traipsing in all dirty and smelly with all their sheep, would they?”

  Jean smacked her fist on the table. “Yes! This is what I’ve been trying to tell you for months and months, Rosa. The shepherds came to Him the way they were. You don’t have to be nice and clean first.”

  “God could never love someone like me, though.”

  Jean exhaled in frustration. “Listen, Dirk loved you the way you were, didn’t he? Even though he knew all about your background?”

  “I told him everything about me.” Rosa felt her face flush as she remembered.

  “And he loved you and married you anyway, right? And he gave you a home with his family. He would give his life for you, wouldn’t he? And what did he ask you to do in return?”

  Tears welled up in Rosa’s eyes as she remembered lying safe in Dirk’s arms on the beach in Virginia, hearing him reassure her. “He said all he wanted was for me to love him back.”

  “See? Dirk didn’t say, ‘Be good first. Clean up your act, then I’ll love you.’ But now, because of his love, you want to be a better person, right? You asked Ginny to teach you to be a good mother. You asked Helen to help you finish your education. You even asked Mrs. Voorhees to teach you to cook all the food Dirk likes, remember? Dirk didn’t demand that you do all of those things. And he won’t stop loving you if you can’t bake pies like his mother. But you want to live a better life because he loves you.”

  “I want to be everything he sees in me.”

  “That’s the way it is with God, Rosa. He loved us before we were ever good enough. Jesus died for us before we ever deserved it. But if we love Him, we’ll want to change. If we tell Him everything we’ve done wrong, He’ll forgive us and take us into His family and help us change. We can’t change all by ourselves. He helps us, just like all your friends h
elped you learn new things.”

  “I even learned to stop asking nosy questions,” Rosa said, smiling at Ginny through her tears. “I think I finally understand. Thanks, Jean. I don’t know why I’m crying if I’m happy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Ginny reached over to hug her, then said, “Here, eat something. You haven’t touched your cookies.”

  Rosa shook her head. “I haven’t felt like eating all day. I don’t know if it’s nerves or the flu. I feel all … crampy.”

  Ginny looked at her intently. “When is your baby due again?”

  “Any day …” Suddenly Rosa had the most embarrassing feeling she could ever imagine. She had just wet herself! Her dress and her chair felt very warm and soaking wet. She could even feel water running down her legs.

  “What’s wrong?” Ginny asked. “You just turned as white as a sheet.”

  “You know how you told me about all the water that’s inside with the baby?”

  “Did it just break?”

  “It’s all over, everywhere! I’m so embarrassed! What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to go to the hospital, that’s what,” Ginny said. Rosa couldn’t imagine why she and Jean were smiling. They looked like they’d just won the largest poker kitty of the night. Jean hurried to round up Patty and her kids, and Ginny rushed outside to warm up her husband’s car. They acted so excited. All Rosa could think about was who would mop the floor and how would she ever dare to ride in Ginny’s nice car without getting the seat all wet?

  Ginny took Rosa home first, driving as if she had a car full of loose eggs that she didn’t want scrambled. “Change your dress and pack your overnight bag,” she told Rosa. “I’ll come back for you after I drop off everyone else.”

  Mrs. Voorhees took one look at Rosa and said, “It’s time, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Rosa couldn’t understand why everyone was smiling at her when she was wet and embarrassed and feeling like something the cat dragged in. Her back hurt, and her stomach felt like she’d drunk too much vodka, and all she wanted to do was lie down somewhere. Tena took Rosa’s hands in hers.