Naomi stuck her arm through Helen’s, nearly tugging her off her feet. “Can you believe it? We’ll be on the fastest, most luxurious troopship in the world!” She led their little parade across the wide gangplank and onto the deck. Fresh ocean breezes wafted through, bringing the smell of fish and something heavenly being cooked on board.
“I sure hope Frank caught a boat like this one,” Helen said, remembering how nauseated he got in cars and trains.
“At least you know he’s safe on the other side,” Naomi said.
Victoria pushed her way between them. “Only because some other soldier’s wife let you know.”
Helen tried not to let on how much Victoria’s words stung. Why hadn’t Frank sent her a telegram? She’d had to get the news from Anderson’s wife. It would be one of the first things she’d ask her husband when they finally got together again. Victoria, of course, had made much of the oversight. That gal stirred up trouble wherever she could. Days ago, poor Lydia had confided that her husband had been operated on for a foot injury, and she feared he flirted with the nurses. Now, Victoria seized every opportunity to launch into a tirade about unfaithful husbands on the home front.
“Let’s get inside and explore!” Peggy elbowed Victoria out of the way and pulled Naomi and Helen through the mass of men and women eager to claim turf on the famous ship. Peggy was tall enough to see over most of the nurses and feisty enough to shove through. The gals—Lydia, Naomi, Peggy, and Helen—had managed to stick together this far and vowed to stay together as long as they could.
Helen felt tinier than ever as she stared around the giant cruise ship. As fantastic as it was, she could see how war had changed the Queen. The superstructure must have been white before, but the Army had painted everything gray. She wondered if a change in color would really make the monster ship harder for the Germans to see. She sure hoped so. Suddenly the war felt close. She’d worried so much about Frank on his voyage over. She’d worried about Eugene and the rest of her brothers. She’d hardly had time to worry about herself.
Peggy led them through crowds of gawkers, down narrow corridors, and on to what must have been a glorious stateroom. Elegance had been replaced by triple-tiered wooden bunks. Their shoes clanked on the metal floor as they lugged duffels, helmets, and boots across what had been miles of carpet.
“I’ve seen pictures of the Queen Mary,” Peggy said. “Gee, I wish we could have ridden her in her heyday.”
“You have no idea of the glamour and excellent service that were the hallmarks of the Queen.” Victoria plopped onto a bunk in an ideal location, wedged into a corner. “I have always preferred the Queen Mary to the Elizabeth. I found the extra expense well worth it.”
As if “Queen Victoria” hadn’t spoken, Peggy continued her own narration. She pointed out a massive wall covered with bulletin boards and notices. “Right there used to be tapestries and paintings.”
Helen could imagine the prewar opulence. Even the Army couldn’t hide the finely carved woodwork, or the beams and panels now covered with leather for protection from the commoners. One day, maybe she and Frank could take a cruise on the fully restored Queen Mary.
“Say, how many of us are they loading onto this boat?” Lydia asked. Like Helen, she’d abandoned her cap, and her straight black hair swung in a fashionable ponytail.
“Ten thousand,” Peggy answered. “Maybe more.”
“Go on!” Naomi gave Peggy a little shove. “That’s twenty times the population of my hometown.”
“You’re not in Kansas anymore, Naomi,” Peggy teased.
“I wasn’t in Kansas before. Iowa.”
“Same difference,” Lydia muttered.
Helen grinned. Not at Liddy’s Midwest slam, but at the line about not being in Kansas anymore. The Wizard of Oz was one of the few movies Helen had seen. She’d taken her little sis when Vin had come for a visit.
“Hang on to your hats, gals!” Peggy shouted. “We’ll be in England before you know it. They stoke this baby so the U-boats can’t hit it.”
U-boats? Helen didn’t want to think about that possibility. Peggy had the news before the Stars and Stripes did. She was always asking patients about their battles. Helen, on the other hand, liked talking to her patients about their families, their plans, their dreams. “Let’s get settled. I want to write Frank.”
The gals groaned as expected, but they followed her and picked bunks close together.
“I don’t know why you bother,” Victoria said, without looking up from filing her fingernails. “He doesn’t write you.”
Helen had learned her lesson. She knew Frank hadn’t stopped writing her. Nobody had received mail while they were waiting for a ship. But that telegram thing—that, she didn’t understand. She started a letter on her last piece of stationery from the Palmer House. “My dear Frankie,” she said aloud as she wrote. “How glad I am that I have you to write. Why, I know some pretty sad and lonely wolfesses who have nothing better to do than their nails.”
The next day was their first mail call, and Helen got seven letters from Frank. As she curled up on her bunk and shuffled her love letters, she thought about a game she used to play with her little sister: “If your room were on fire, what one thing would you take with you?” Vin always gave the same answer: a doll their oldest sister, Anne, had given her on her fifth birthday. Helen never gave the same answer twice: “My blue dress.” “My basketball.” “My diary.” Now, fingering the papers stretched across her bunk, she knew how she’d answer. “If the Queen Mary got torpedoed and you could only take one thing into the water with you, what would it be?” Helen smiled to herself as she silently answered, These letters from Frank.
ABOARD THE QUEEN MARY
First thing in the morning, Helen and the others reported for duty to the supply sergeant, a grizzled fellow who looked like he would have been at home bear hunting in the wilderness and would have preferred it to overseeing a flock of females.
“I want this whole place in shape by nightfall, or you ladies will be spending the night where you stand!” he barked. Helen assumed he meant the double-wide pantry and the crates scattered on the floor. “You’re not just tidying up. I want a count on every item. Label each one. And double-check your numbers.”
“Aye aye, Captain!” Peggy winked at the old geezer. That gal could get away with murder.
Victoria sat on a nearby crate and complained, “This isn’t what I signed up for. I’m a nurse, not a janitor.”
Helen ignored her and asked, “Does anyone know where this ship will dock?”
“Peggy?” Lydia pressed when nobody ventured a guess. “Don’t tell me you’re in the dark with the rest of us.”
“’Fraid so. I do know that we’ll soon be called the 199th hôpital général, if that’s a clue.”
“Oui!” Victoria cried. Peggy had made her put on box labels, though she couldn’t keep up. “J’adore Paris!”
Helen had been certain they’d end up in France, but they’d have to take another boat across the Channel. So with any luck, she’d be in England long enough to see Frank before her unit moved on. “Frank and I want to see Paris together,” she said, remembering planning and dreaming on their honeymoon.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite flock of nurses!” Bill Chitwood set down two large boxes. “Bandages for the one-nine-nine.”
“Bill!” Helen really was glad to see him, although it made her feel weepy, like running into a cousin she hadn’t seen in years and realizing how much she’d missed him. She hadn’t seen Bill since Battle Creek. “I wondered what you’d gotten up to.”
“Don’t ask.” He opened one of the boxes.
Helen reached in and pulled out rolls of fabric bandages. “Golly . . . do they really think we’re going to need all of these where we’re going?”
“Now, Nurse Eberhart. You know better than to speculate,” Bill said.
Helen put her fists on her hips in mock outrage. “That’s Nurse Daley, Private Chitwood.”
“I’m impressed,” she said. Bill had lost weight, making him look a decade older than when they were in Battle Creek. What would he be like by the war’s end? What would she? “How’s Jennie?”
Bill’s smile widened. “Jennie’s swell. Writes me every day.”
“I hope you write her every day too,” Helen said, grateful that Frankie matched her two or three daily letters.
“Purt’ near, ma’am. I’m looking forward to the day I can see her in person. I sent her a picture of me so’s she wouldn’t be too shocked when we finally meet up.”
“Are you telling me you’ve never seen each other?” Victoria asked. “You don’t even know what she looks like?”
“Don’t care,” Bill said.
“You will,” Victoria said.
Lydia seemed to share Vic’s incredulity. “What if she’s nothing like her letters? She could be a kid.”
“Or an old woman,” Victoria added.
Helen jumped to Bill’s defense. “Jennie’s brother knew Bill in Texas, in boot camp. When she couldn’t get hold of her brother, she got worried and wrote Bill. He wrote her back. They’ve been writing ever since.”
“Sounds like true love to me,” Peggy said.
Lydia opened her mouth, then must have thought better of it and went back to unpacking.
“What do you know about where we’re going, Bill?” Naomi asked.
“Soon as we hit dirt, we’ll be joined by an outfit arriving on the good ship USS West Point, the one they used to call America. We’ll be rushed to a more permanent location with them.”
Helen dropped her box and stared up at him. “Don’t say rushed, Bill. I have to see Frank before we move on.”
Peggy was checking numbers on the boxes against numbers on their clipboard. “Going by my previous experience with the Army, ‘rushed’ is an unreliable description for anything they do.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Bill said, heading back the way he’d come.
“Frank will find you,” Peggy said. “And I heard that the best hotels in Paris give servicemen one or two nights free until closer to Christmas.”
“Sometimes I’m glad you’re a know-it-all, Peggy,” Helen mused.
They worked all day and had just finished the last box when Bill showed up with one more. Victoria had been gone for hours, and Lydia left when they were nearly finished with what they’d thought was the last box.
Peggy groaned. “Bill, couldn’t you have waited until we were gone? Dinner starts in fifteen minutes, and I’m not going like this.” She finger-combed her naturally curly, naturally unruly red hair.
“You go on, Peggy,” Naomi said, wiping sweat from her brow. The poor gal might have been finishing the loading job at the canning factory where Helen had worked before nurse’s training. That job turned men and women old before their time, a lifestyle Helen had recalled whenever she felt overwhelmed with student nursing.
“You go too, Naomi,” she said.
“I’m fine, Helen.” Naomi leaned over to pull the lid off the new box, and Helen could see her bite her lip and try to mask her back pain.
“Go! Bill and I have things to discuss. His Jennie, my Frankie. Right, Bill?”
“If you say so, Nurse.”
Naomi and Peggy protested further, but Helen won, and she and Bill dug into the box, which was filled with small brown bottles. While they stuck on labels and recorded the inventory, they talked about Jennie and Frank. But Bill wasn’t quite himself. Helen could tell something was bothering him. “You didn’t let Victoria get to you, did you, Bill?”
“Nah. I’m not worried about Jennie.” He sighed. “I’m more worried about how I’ll look to her.”
“Are you kidding? You’re a catch! She’ll have your picture, too, so no surprises.”
“It’s not that. I’m worried I might not come back . . . whole, if you want the truth of it. I’ve seen a lot of fellas go home in wheelchairs and worse. I’d never want Jennie to settle for half a man.”
Helen searched for something to say. “Oh, Bill. Nothing’s going to happen to you! You’re going to be just fine.”
He dropped the box he was working on. “You can’t know that! How do you think all them boys on your ward in Battle Creek got sent there, minus some pretty important body parts?”
“How can you even say that? It won’t happen to you.” Helen realized she’d stuck the wrong label on two bottles. She ripped them off and wadded them up.
Bill wouldn’t let it go. “You and I have both seen too much of this war already, and we’re on our way to see a whole lot more. You can’t control a world at war, you know.”
“Fine. But even if the worst does happen to you—and it won’t!—what you and Jennie have goes deeper than that. She’d love you no matter what, and you’d be all right. You’d get through it together.”
Bill stopped handing her bottles and gave her a raised-eyebrow look that made her think of a cantankerous cowboy. “Is that what you’d do if Dr. Frank greeted you at the docks in a wheelchair, with no legs and nothing from the waist down?” He looked away.
Helen did not want to hear this. Or picture it. Her hand shook when she grabbed the bottle out of Bill’s hands. “Yes, of course it’s what I’d do. But it’s not going to happen. We’re all coming out of this in one piece. And I don’t want to hear another word about it. Let’s get this box finished.”
Aboard the Queen Mary
Darling,
Can’t believe I’m sitting here in my cozy stateroom. My bunkmates are quiet and peaceful, with the exception of Victoria. Thankfully, she is a gadabout and seldom here.
Still no word from Eugene. Gosh, I’m worried about him. Pray for him, okay?
Sorry for the interruption—we were just visited by Nurse Simpson, chief nurse aboard, an odd soul, shorter than I am. Her nose twitches like a bunny’s, and with her hair pulled into a bun, her ears, which are rather pointed, stick out, as do her buckteeth. Lydia whispered to me, “Offer her a carrot,” which sent me into a fit of giggles that I could not, of course, explain or excuse.
But that wasn’t the worst. Naomi and I had wrapped our raincoats and rubbers in our bedrolls, and Nurse Simpson was quite upset because we didn’t follow packing orders. Naomi did so by mistake, and I by design. I’ve never worn ugly rubbers and don’t know why I should start now.
I suppose I shall learn soon enough. If you see someone having lost their shoes in the mud (as forewarned by Nurse Simpson)—guess who?
With love,
Tiny
P.S. I know it’s far-fetched, but I can’t help picturing you standing open armed, waiting for me wherever the Queen Mary docks. I can see you there, that clever look on your face that says, “Aren’t I something to have pulled this off?” And I say, “Amen!”
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND
Frank wasn’t waiting on the docks when they landed.
“Helen, you knew he couldn’t have been here. We didn’t even know where we’d dock,” Naomi said.
“I know.” But in spite of all that knowing, she’d hoped Frank would be here waiting for her.
Victoria made herself known by bumping into Helen. “Maybe he doesn’t want to see you as badly as you want to see him.”
“Go away, Vic.” Helen took one last look back at the Queen. The whole world seemed encased in a fog mixed with black smoke from factory chimneys visible across the water. From the docks, she could see crumbled bricks and burned lumber, bombed-out buildings everywhere.
A hand clamped her shoulder. “Welcome to Liverpool, Nurses!”
Helen looked up into the smiling face of Bill Chitwood.
“What’s in Liverpool?” Lydia asked.
“Fish,” said Peggy Know-It-All. She sighed. “I could happily eat a dozen crabs about now. And two dozen lobsters.”
Bill chuckled. “Now, you’re onto something there, Nurse.”
They huddled together, stamping their feet.
It didn’t help.
“Put your helmet on, Helen,” Peggy urged.
“I hate hats.” She’d slung her helmet over her arm. Thank heavens she’d worn her Army boots or she’d have frozen feet. “What are we waiting for?”
“Transport.” Like a good soldier, Peggy was wearing the drab rubbers, her helmet, and Army-issued attire.
“There are trucks all over the place,” Naomi said. “You can’t tell me none of them has room for us.”
Lydia’s face had turned bright red from the cold. “I’m all for sneaking back to the Queen until the Army makes up its mind.”
Finally, Simpson, the bunny nurse, rounded them up and pointed out their transport trucks. “Move along!” she shouted as they piled in. Once the truck filled, Simpson introduced them to Colonel Pugh. Helen could imagine him featured in the newsreels they ran before picture shows. He wasn’t as good-looking as Frank, of course, but he exuded confidence. As she eyed him taking command, she decided the jury was still out on him.
Wedged between Lydia and Naomi, Helen said a silent prayer of thanks for her height, which proved short enough to have the wind blocked by other bodies. Colonel Pugh sat next to Peggy, who peppered him with questions.
“How long are we going to be here, Colonel?” Peggy asked.
“The Liverpool assignment is temporary,” Pugh conceded. “You should be ready to depart on twenty-four-hour notice.”
“Where are we going after Liverpool?” she pressed.
“You might as well know that we’ll be moving south to the coast, where we’ll board the SS Léopoldville. We’ll sail to a town on the French coast, Étretat. The major harbor, Le Havre, was, I’m afraid, completely destroyed, forcing us to take the long way around. Our ultimate destination is Rennes. It was the first city in France to be liberated, a happy event which transpired on August 4.”
August 4 was Helen’s wedding day. Surely this was a good sign.
“Still, nobody gets out of this truck until I give the word,” Pugh said. “Understood? The Germans left undetonated mines for us, so you’d better watch your step.”
With Love, Wherever You Are Page 19
