Some Luck

by Jane Smiley

  In the meantime, Eloise had gotten out of the newspaper business and was working for the WPA in San Francisco. She had rented some kind of duplex there, and Rosa was in a school with all sorts of children, including Negro children and Italian children and maybe even some Japs, though Eloise was very coy about that, and Rosanna had thought that all the Japs were sent away to camps—there was one in Kansas, Rosanna thought she had heard that, but maybe not. No one talked about it. There was a POW camp up in Algona, and another one over in Clarinda, and those POWs worked the farms around there, but Rosanna thought that Joey, John, and Walter were doing fine. POWs in the neighborhood would have made her nervous.

  Lillian wanted to go out to San Francisco and get a job when she graduated from high school in the spring, and Rosanna was against it, but not for the reason Walter was, which was that San Francisco was impossibly far away—three days by train. Was she going to sit up the whole way? If not, a berth was very expensive. Rosanna knew that Lillian was not quite ready to tell Walter that she could pay the fare herself. He had no idea how much she had been paid at the drugstore (he would be amazed and a little disapproving—he would certainly not have factored in tips, because Walter thought waitresses only got good tips for flirting). No, Rosanna didn’t mind the thought of Lillian having a little bit of an adventure—she would be nineteen this year, for Heaven’s sake. Rosanna was married and then pregnant when she was nineteen. What Rosanna minded was the idea that, when Lillian got to San Francisco, Eloise was not going to be the one to take her places where she could meet the right sort of man. Rosanna was sure that Eloise was continuing to consort with Jews and Italians and even Negroes, just as she did in Chicago, and what she would most likely do for Lillian was take her to some low-class neighborhoods and have her hand out leaflets about unions and meet pipe fitters and men like that. Rosanna had no beef with pipe fitters per se—every man she had ever known got his hands dirty every day of the week and most Sundays, and if her father owned a pair of shoes rather than boots, she had never seen them. However, even though Lillian was too good for that life, she was sure to throw herself away, and Eloise wouldn’t stop her.

  Rosanna had always called Lillian an “angel” and a “saint,” and so she should not have been surprised when Lillian turned out to be that very thing, but the result was that she was kindest to all the wrong girls and dated all the wrong boys. Who took her to the Christmas Dance, for example? None other than Otis Olsson, the most backward boy in the senior class, who could not drive and had to be driven by his older brother, Oscar. Why did she go with Otis? Well, she felt sorry for him. The other boys who asked her could date whoever they wanted, but Otis didn’t dare ask anyone. And why did they come home early? Well, Otis got carsick on the way over, and threw up beside the road, and that was that. And then there was the Riemann girl, who came over sometimes. Lillian helped her with her homework while the girl gazed open-mouthed at her—adenoidal for sure. Yes, Lillian had other friends, better friends, but these were the ones she seemed to value, and with only Eloise to guide her, she would surely marry someone of just the same type.

  Of course, Joey was going to marry Minnie as soon as Mrs. Frederick passed away and Joey could convince Minnie to have him. It was written all over his face and body that he thought the world of Minnie, though she did look used up for her age, twenty-six now, but looking thirty if a day. And Joey not even twenty-three, but every time Rosanna saw him, it was Minnie-this and Minnie-that, and, kind boy that he was, he helped out over there, not to mention that he was practically farming the whole place. Roland Frederick had gone downhill all of a sudden, and couldn’t do a thing. Minnie would get the farm, and Joey would marry her, and so he would have the farm, and nothing wrong with that for a boy his age. But it was about as exciting as a hard frost, as Oma used to say.

  Probably the best she could hope for with Frank was that he did not bring home a war bride. But she hardly dared think about it.

  ON THE FIRST of March, Hildy showed up. Hildy Bergstrom, in a blue Dodge, wearing a navy-blue suit, a stylish white hat with a navy-blue grosgrain band, a beaver coat, and warm snow boots. She parked in the drive just off the road, made her way through the late-winter mud to the front porch, and knocked. When Rosanna spied her through the window, she thought the young woman was lost, or selling something.

  She was a beautiful girl, very like Carole Lombard had been (what a sad thing that airplane crash was, still), but with four or five more inches of height, and not quite as square a jaw. She held out her hand and said, “Oh, Mrs. Langdon, I’ve been wanting to meet you for such a long time. I was in the neighborhood, and I couldn’t resist stopping by. I’m Hildy. Hildy Bergstrom. I’m Frank’s fiancée.”

  Well, of course Rosanna’s eye snapped straight to her ring finger, but she had gloves on—nice ones made of white cotton with a bit of cutwork around the wrists. Rosanna took her hand, shook it, and said, “Would you like to come in? It’s rather cold out here, isn’t it? We can have some tea.”

  The house, of course, was perfectly clean and neat, and not terribly ramshackle. At New Year’s, Rosanna had slipcovered the sofa with some nice green chenille, and her best afghan—ivory lace in a fan stitch—was folded over the armchair. Henry had some books around—not even thirteen, and deep into something called The Woman in White. Rosanna picked the book off the sofa, turned down the corner of the page, and set it on the lamp table. She saw Hildy glance at it and said, “Frank’s brother Henry is an avid reader.”

  “Oh, I am, too. I love books.”

  Rosanna left her looking around politely and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Making the tea took all of four minutes, just because the range was already hot, and she had boiled the kettle half an hour before. She even had sugar, cream, of course, and some lemon left over from the lemon pie she had baked over the weekend. Rosanna glanced into the windowpane beside the back door. Did she look anymore as though it was possible for her to produce a specimen like Frankie? Not much. She repinned a couple of hairpins and carried the tea and the cups and saucers into the front room. She set them down on the coffee table and sat on the sofa. Hildy gave her a bright smile. Rosanna said, “So—what brings you to our neighborhood? We’re a little out of the way.”

  “Frank maybe has told you that I live in Kansas City now. Anyway, I had to go to Albert Lea, and I thought that I wouldn’t have a better opportunity to say hi, so here I am.”

  “What do you do in Kansas City?”

  “Oh, goodness. So many things. I love Kansas City. I’m a buyer for Halls. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s part of Hallmark Cards.”

  “Is there something they need in Albert Lea?” Rosanna poured the tea. Hildy took sugar, not cream.

  Hildy leaned forward. “Not on your life. I’m going to visit my cousin. He and his wife just had a baby, so I took a few days off. We’ve already bought our spring collections, so it’s a little bit of a quiet period.” She gave Rosanna another big smile, then said, “Frank talked so much about his family and the farm. I’m just thrilled to meet you. I do hope Joe, Lillian, Henry, and Claire turn up.”

  That was good, Rosanna thought. She did not believe for a moment that Frank had a fiancée—not because he would have told her, but because it just wasn’t like him to be so conventional. But the young woman knew something.

  “Claire should be home from school anytime now. Henry and Lillian come later.”

  “I’m sure they’re very busy.”

  A lull settled over the conversation. Both of them took a sip of tea.

  Finally, Hildy trilled, “So—what have you heard from Frank lately?”

  Rosanna looked at her straight on. “Nothing.”

  Hildy’s smile brightened, then wobbled, then faded. Rosanna said, “How about you?”

  Hildy said, “It’s been a while, I must say. I was getting a bit worried.”

  “My brother didn’t write his wife for nine months after he went over.”

  “I know he’
s in …” She hesitated the barest moment then said, “France.” But, then, everyone was in France. Rosanna said, “Sometimes he writes to a girl who lives nearby. He’s known her since grammar school. She showed me a letter that said he got to the Rhine, and there was no one there, but Eisenhower wouldn’t let them go across. Very strange. That was November.” Minnie had gotten this letter, the most recent one. Rosanna pretended that she wasn’t watching Hildy very carefully. But Hildy wasn’t much of an actress. She sighed, and her face fell. Rosanna softened her voice. “When was the last time you heard from Frankie?”

  Rosanna expected the girl to say, “Last summer,” but she said, “I never have.”

  “Are you really his fiancée?”

  Hildy stared at Rosanna for a moment, then burst into tears. “But I should be!” she said. “I was going to be! If he hadn’t left so suddenly, I would be. We were getting along beautifully. He told me everything.”

  Rosanna took a sip of tea, then set the cup and saucer on the table. She said, “With Frankie, that might be a reason that you would never be his fiancée.”

  “Why? Why would that be?” Her voice rose. Clearly this was a thought she had had herself.

  “Look, Hildy. I’m not saying that I understand Frankie, or ever have. He’s not like anyone in our family that we know of. But I do know that if you expect him to do something and he senses your expectation, that’s enough to make him not do it.”

  Hildy had taken off one of her gloves, and now she started twisting it between her hands. Rosanna reached for it, took it, and smoothed it on the table. Hildy, whose crying had subsided, started again. When was the last time Rosanna had seen any of her children cry? Joey, maybe, about some animal’s death. But that had been years ago by this point. No one cried at Rolf’s funeral or Oma’s funeral. Rosanna said, “You’re a beautiful girl, Hildy. You need to find someone else.”

  Hildy shook her head. “I tried. And one of them did ask me to marry him, but I couldn’t. I can’t forget Frank.”

  “What does your mother say?”

  “She doesn’t know. Frank would never come to Decorah to meet anyone.”

  “There you go,” said Rosanna.

  “I can’t do it,” said Hildy.

  The one who broke the spell was Claire, who slammed through the front door, saying, “Whose car is that? Hi! Who are you?”

  This girl, Hildy, reassembled herself in about two seconds, so quickly that Rosanna would have bet that Claire had no idea of the scene that she had intruded upon. Hildy smiled, reached forward, picked up and slipped on the glove Rosanna had laid on the table. She said, “That’s my car. I’m Hildy Bergstrom. I knew your brother in college, and I was passing by. Are you Claire?”

  Claire nodded.

  “Well, I need to leave if I want to get to Albert Lea at a decent hour.” She stood up and put on her coat. Truly, her surface was perfect, thought Rosanna. Her makeup was hardly smudged, which meant that it wasn’t makeup—the beauty belonged to her. From a pure breeding standpoint, Rosanna thought, the two specimens of livestock known as Frank and Hildy would certainly produce champions, wouldn’t they?

  She took Hildy to the door, and Claire walked her to her car. She came back with a box of fudge and said, “She was nice.”

  “She was,” said Rosanna.

  ALL THROUGH GERMANY, Ruben made himself a little business, and Frank didn’t stop him. In every town and village that they passed through, Ruben went into houses and shops and stole things. It wasn’t hard—the Jerries ran off when they saw the Americans coming, and they didn’t always lock up behind themselves. Even when they did, Ruben smashed a window or kicked open a door. If there was someone cowering inside, Ruben banished her from the house, then went through the things. Sometimes there was jewelry, but Ruben was more interested in lace and figurines, fancy letter openers, music boxes, ornate picture frames, silver hairbrushes and hand mirrors. He took one or two items every day. What was astonishing to Frank was that the houses did have doors—and windowpanes and roofs and nice things. That Ruben should export some of these nice items to a shop his cousin had in Cape May, New Jersey, was okay with Frank. What Frank saw that he wished he could export was that gunpowder the Germans used—smokeless and entirely unrevealing of the shooter’s position. Or those machine guns they had, which fired so quickly that they made one long buzzing sound instead of series of pops, like American weapons. The tanks. The 88s. The Bouncing Betties. The Teller mines. The Russians had more manpower and the Americans had more money, but the Germans had know-how that Professor Cullhane could only dream of.

  The slave camp they stumbled across was called Kaufering. All the slaves, who looked barely alive, were bundled into huts dug out of the ground and roofed over. The men (or boys) were like skeletons draped with rags—Frank had never seen anything like them, even in France, even in Italy. It was hard to decide which was more horrifying: the long pile of tormented corpses laid out on the ground, their sticklike arms and legs askew, and their heads angled back as if they were still screaming in pain, or the not-yet-dead, who looked just the same but were still standing (barely) and breathing. They had been employed, apparently, in building airplanes or rockets, but how they could even lift their tools Frank could not understand. Another unit, Frank heard, had come across some of these people being driven by their Jerry captors deeper into Germany. This seemed to be the last thing the Germans wanted to do, the thing they cared most about—shooting their slaves. The slaves were Jewish. Like Julius. Like Rosa. It made Frank feel frozen and horror-struck in a way he had not felt on the battlefield.

  They had a look at Hitler’s summer residence, the Berghof. Though most of it had been bombed to pieces before they got there, there was plenty to look at, and both the place where Hitler was said to have had tea every day, and another place, higher up, were intact. Ruben made himself busy finding things in the garden, and he did get two items—a spoon that he found under a bush, and a button. He told everyone it was Hitler’s own button, the one that popped off his fly when he was pissing himself in fear. But Frank pointed out that Hitler hadn’t been there since the previous July. Ruben said, “He knew we were coming.” These souvenirs he intended to keep, “unless I get a good offer.”

  Around the time they got to Berchtesgaden, they began hearing rumors about the Russians—that Ike didn’t want to confront the Russians, that the Russians were taking Berlin, that the Russians were coming in hordes from the east and overrunning everything, that the Russians could not be stopped, that their own units had been ordered to meet up with the Fifth Army, which had been making its way up through Italy, so that in case the Russians showed up there would be plenty of them to fight the Russians back to Germany or Czechoslovakia or wherever. There were so many Russians that they could get all the way to western France—this was why no one was being sent home, or even to the Pacific. The next war could easily begin.

  Because of Eloise and Julius, Frank was the only one he knew who had any ideas about Stalin, but listening to Eloise and Julius argue all those months in Chicago had done its work—the argument had never been about whether Stalin would kill his friends, only about how close to Stalin you had to be to get it first. Julius always swore that Trotsky’s greatest mistake was leaving Stalin back in the Kremlin—he should never have trusted Stalin for a moment. Eloise always said, well, how could he have known, and things needed to be done, and when you were part of a unit, trust was essential. And then there were the trials. Maybe the ones who were executed had done something, said Eloise; no, they hadn’t, said Julius. It went on and on. So Frank was pretty sure that Stalin was waiting to get organized, and then he would push to the west, and the next war would begin. But Ruben and Cornhill didn’t agree. Cornhill thought that Stalin couldn’t care less about Europe, that he would concentrate on rebuilding all those towns—Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kharkov—that the Germans had destroyed. “We can worry about him in ten years,” said Cornhill. Ruben didn’t care. He thought France and Germ
any, not to mention Italy, were such a mess that Stalin was welcome to them. “They ain’t spending my money to fix up this dump” was what he said.

  Frank said, “I didn’t think you paid taxes.”

  Ruben shrugged. “You get my meaning, though. We done our bit. I knew some commies in Jersey City.” He rolled his eyes.

  JOE LIKED TO THINK of Lillian’s birthday as the first day of the harvest—if they were lucky. He kept this to himself, but enjoyed the meals Rosanna always cooked for the birthday. Harvesting was hard work, and he needed a little extra sustenance in the form of, say, a seven-layer cake, to keep him going, especially if the remainder of the cake got sent home with him because Lillian was watching her weight. This year, though, he, Walter, and John got stuck in the fence line in a wet spot at Grandpa Wilmer’s, and it took Grandpa Wilmer, who was all the way at the other corner of the farm, two hours to bring his own tractor over and pull them out. Joe knew this was his fault—he should have walked that part of the field. Papa wasn’t mad, though, because he hadn’t bothered to walk it, either. On the way home, Walter said, “Someday, I will give you a list of all the mistakes I’ve made, and then another list of all the mistakes my father has made that I thought I would never make. You can compare the two.”

  Everyone was there when they came in, and it turned out they weren’t going to miss anything—not the rib roast or the scalloped potatoes or the crescent rolls. Lois was there—Joe could see her through the screen door, sitting by the table, watching something intently. It didn’t matter what, Joe knew; Lois was a watcher—it could be flies on the ceiling. Lillian was up in her room, reading and, Joe knew, pretending that this was a surprise party. Walter blew out some air, threw his cap onto the hook, and started washing up. Joe kicked off a boot, and then heard his mom say, “That is just like him, I swear, saying we ought to hand over how to build an atomic bomb like a doughnut recipe, just to be nice.”