by Cat Winters
“How old are you?” I asked.
He looked at me again. “Why do you ask?”
“You suddenly seem so much younger than before.”
He adjusted his weight with a creak of the bed. “I’m twenty-four.”
“Really?” My mouth fell open. “You’re a year younger than me?”
“You’re twenty-five?”
“Yes. I thought you were older.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Just twenty-four. I feel decades older, though, and I probably look it, too. I’ve already pulled out a few white hairs after leaving Germany.”
“No, you look just fine.” I stroked his hair again and tried to read the stoic expression in his blue eyes, which watched me as much as I watched them. “You must have been no more than twenty when they put you in the army.”
“I left home for war on my twentieth birthday, but I certainly wasn’t the youngest one in the army.” He lured my hand away from his hair and rubbed his thumb over the backs of my fingers. “Don’t ever think of me as an innocent babe, Ivy. As anyone back home would tell you, I was a hellion who craved girls, booze, and adventure from far too young an age. I was begging for trouble.”
“If I asked you why you left Germany . . . and the war”—I gave the strained smile of a person who’s certain she’s bound to encounter rejection—“would you tell me?”
He turned his face away again, toward the bare wooden wall.
“Were you injured?” I asked.
“I left Germany”—he swallowed—“in 1915, but there’s no need for me to say anything more about it. That’s all over now.”
“I’m not going to betray any of your secrets to the authorities, if that’s what worries you.” I cleared my throat and felt heat rise to my cheeks. “I’m not even the first person I’ve known to take a German lover.”
He didn’t respond, or move, so I continued. “My friend Helen—”
“Helmut Weiss’s mistress.”
I sat up straight. “You know about Helen and Mr. Weiss?”
“Helmut is my father’s cousin. That’s why Albrecht moved to this specific town after he left Germany—after his wife and baby died. He wanted to leave his troubles behind in Deutschland but still be close to family.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that.” I blinked a few more times and tried to digest the connection between Daniel and Helen’s German. “Well, anyway,” I continued, “last July I went to see a motion picture with Helen—I don’t even remember which one, something with Douglas Fairbanks in it—and one of those Four Minute Men got up in front of the audience while the projectionist changed the reels.”
“Ach, I really hate those Four Minute idiots.”
I smiled. “I’ve never been fond of them either. This one gave his little speech about Liberty Loans or saving peach pits for gas masks, something along those lines. And Helen leaned over to me and said, ‘I’m worried someone will hang Mr. Weiss like they did Robert Prager.’” I sighed and shook my head. “At the moment, I didn’t care a fig about Mr. Weiss. I just thought of him as a lecherous, forty-year-old German adulterer who should have never involved himself with one of my friends. Now I have to wonder, though”—I sighed again—“what was his life like over here? Was he a good man, deep down, despite his flaws, if someone as smart and vibrant as Helen fell in love with him?”
A little pucker of discontent formed between Daniel’s eyebrows.
I nudged the back of his hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Do you know who reported Helmut to the American Protective League and lied about him failing to buy Liberty Bonds?”
“I thought we weren’t bringing up the APL anymore.”
“You brought up Cousin Helmut. It’s impossible not to talk about him without mentioning those Schweine.”
“Who, then?” I asked. “One of his customers?”
“No, his American-born wife. She found him with his hussy back in the bakery kitchen and immediately went to the authorities. Those terrible APL idiots showed up at his store and instructed him to leave town or else suffer dire consequences.” Daniel glanced at me out of the corners of his eyes. “There’s a prison camp for German-American civilians at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. Another one exists at Fort Douglas in Utah. At one time or another, we all received the threat of detainment, but that didn’t worry any of us half as much as the real possibility of a lynching.”
I swallowed the taste of bile and muttered, “Helen Fay wasn’t a hussy.”
“And Helmut Weiss wasn’t a traitor. He was just a Dummkopf who cheated on his wife.”
I lowered my head and kneaded my lips together.
Across the street the band played a song I recognized, “Nightingale Rag,” and I wondered what it would take to get Daniel to join me over in the lodge, just to escape all that talk of traitors and prison camps and lynching. He covered my right hand with his hot palm and managed to slow my breathing. Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized my lungs were contracting and expanding at a brisk and unhealthy pace.
“Never mind all that.” He swallowed. “Come back early in the morning, after you’ve finished carting those poor bastards around town. Sleep here again.”
“I should probably pay my landlady first, so she doesn’t think I’ve run off. I was supposed to be the first-ever boarder of the Dover Home for Women of Independent Means.”
“Haven’t you run off?”
“I don’t know.” I managed a halfhearted grin. “I honestly don’t know where I belong anymore. No place feels quite right.”
“Bring your things to my place. Stay here.”
I shook my head. “I can’t live here, Daniel.”
“Why not? We’ll be no worse off than Helen and Helmut.” He snorted. “Oh, Scheisse. Even their names make them sound like a comical, doomed pair, no?”
“Precisely. They were doomed, and we’ll be no different. The authorities ripped apart her apartment and threw her across the room. I don’t even know if she’s alive anymore.”
He squeezed his hands around mine. “Stop worrying about everyone and everything. Come live here and drink away all your woes with me.”
I pulled my hands out of his and shifted sideways on the bed. “I don’t understand you.”
“What?” He leaned toward me. “What don’t you understand?”
“You won’t kiss my lips or tell me a thing about you—why you’re not in the German army anymore, who your parents are. Yet you want me to abandon my last precarious remnants of respectability so we can live together in sin.”
“It’s not sin.”
“Yes, it is.” My voice turned louder than expected, echoing off the walls. “To the rest of the world I’ll be a hussy, like you just said of Helen. People like Lucas will keep calling me the whore of a German spy.”
“I am not a spy.”
“How do I know that? What proof have you ever given me to show that the German government didn’t send you over here to—?”
“I’m a deserter.”
I stiffened. “What?”
His jaw hardened. “I’m a deserter. I’d be executed if I ever returned to Germany. My parents don’t even know where I am.”
“You deserted the German armed forces?”
He nodded.
I gasped. “How? How did you not get killed?”
“I very nearly did—several times. But I made it. That’s why I’m here.”
He didn’t elaborate, so I sat back on my hands and let the ragtime music settle inside my blood, longing to find a way to lure more of his story out of him. I imagined myself as a magician in a silk top hat and Daniel’s history as colorful scarves I could draw out of his sleeves and view in all their clarity. Truth is a torch, as the poet Goethe had warned, but I didn’t care if Daniel’s stories scorched and blinded me.
I wanted the truth in one giant dose.
Daniel pushed the sheets off his legs with a sudden movement that made me stiffen. He climbed out of bed, put on his undershi
rt, and with a leonine grace that betrayed nothing of his status as a deserter and a refugee, he sauntered over to his guitar. I watched him ease down on the other side of the mattress with the instrument poised on his lap. He fussed with the strings and the knobs for no more than a minute, and then he strummed a subdued version of the jazz band’s song that drifted through the window.
“It was during a furlough back home,” he said as he played, his back toward me, his shoulders rocking with the smallest fraction of a sway. “Instead of returning to my post, I burned my uniform and somehow managed to escape to Holland without getting shot. Then I snuck aboard a steamer bound for New York. I hid down in the dark filth of a coal bunker and traveled at sea like a rat in a hole for nearly two weeks—nearly died of starvation. I honestly don’t know how I made it here alive. I arrived in America as a sack of skin and bones.” He withdrew his left fingers from the strings and swiveled in my direction. The music across the street played on without him.
“That’s why I could never enlist in the U.S. Army,” he said. “The newspaper article got that one detail correct: I never registered for the draft. I’m a wanted enemy of the Fatherland, and I can’t return to Europe.”
My lips parted to respond, but then he added, “I killed a great number of people in the war, Ivy. I’m not worthy of a kiss from your lips, so don’t ever feel you’re being deprived of something sacred if we never share the type of love you might be hoping to share. I’m a killer and a deserter, and no one wants me in their country. Not Germany, not America or Canada or any other place involved in the war. I’m considered an enemy of everyone.”
I trembled from head to toe, all alone on my side of the bed; the battlefields of Europe had never edged so uncomfortably close to Buchanan, Illinois.
Daniel lowered his guitar to the floor with a soft tap of the wood against the boards. He sat up straight again and said, “I can’t allow myself to love you. But I’ll continue to take away your pain, if that’s what you need of me. God knows, you’re saving me from my pain.”
“I’m glad,” I said with my shoulders hunched, my voice cracking. “I’m glad I’ve helped.”
He walked over to me on silent footfalls and stroked the hair above my right ear, as I’d just done to him. “Do you want me to give you a quick tumble before you leave?” He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, spilling a chill down to my toes. “So we can forget this ugliness? Would that help?”
I nodded, and even though it made no sense to pull down my drawers after hearing his grueling accounts of hardships and near death, I couldn’t get my underclothes off my legs fast enough. Daniel tugged down his pants and laid me back on the edge of his bed. While the jazz band wailed a song as frantic and fervent as “Slippery Hank,” I wrapped my legs around his waist and imagined the two of us as sticks of kindling, striking together, desperate for the taste of fire.
Chapter 17
I found the Red Cross ambulance parked alongside the curb outside Daniel’s store, rumbling, shaking, ready to drive.
Addie’s mask-covered face turned my way from the passenger side, and she sat up straight in the seat. “There she is.”
Nela’s eyes popped into view above her own swath of gauze beside Addie. “You can always bring him with you, you know,” she called to me. “It wouldn’t hurt to have a man around for the heavier lifting.”
I buttoned up my coat and wished my face didn’t heat up like a chimney every time anyone alluded to sex or Daniel.
“If you’re driving four blocks away from the Red Cross headquarters”—I hopped into the empty driver’s seat beside Nela—“then you can certainly drive down to Southside on your own. Why are you waiting here for me?”
Neither passenger answered. Nela fussed with the black Red Cross–issued necktie hanging down her chest. Addie picked at a spot of dirt or dust or something equally miniscule on the dashboard.
“You’ve helmed a massive automotive,” I said, “and parked it nicely alongside a curb, I might add. Not an easy task in the slightest. Why did you wait around for me when I know you must be longing to drive off as soon as possible?”
“I don’t want to cross the railroad tracks,” said Nela. She tugged on her necktie with so much nervous strength, she unraveled the knot. “I don’t want to stall in front of a locomotive ever again.”
“You won’t. You’ve gotten so much more adept at driving. You can get yourself over the tracks just as easily as you drove down this street. Here . . .” I jumped out of the vehicle and waved for Nela to do the same. “Let’s trade places. You drive, and I’ll be sitting right next to you if anything happens.”
“Oh, Lord, have mercy on our souls,” said Addie into the thick gray collar of her coat.
Nela slid across the seat, her mouth tight, her body rigid. She stepped out of the ambulance so that I could scoot in between them.
I’d never heard such a troubled sigh as when Nela dropped down into the driver’s position.
“You’ll be absolutely fine.” I nudged my arm against hers. “I promise.”
Nela lowered her face. “I’m just a stupid woman, Ivy. And a foreigner at that.”
“Poppycock!—as my granny Letty would have said.” I raised my chin. “I’ve been driving my family’s trucks and tractors since I was fifteen years old, and not once did my womb or my breasts get in the way of steering and braking.”
Both Nela and Addie laughed throaty chuckles.
“American birth certificates aren’t required to power the vehicles either,” I added. “You can do this, Nela. You merely require confidence and practice.”
“All right.” Nela released the emergency brake—as well as another sigh that seemed to derive from the bottom of her lungs. “Let us go.” She pulled on the throttle and spark advance levers with beautiful synchronicity, rolled the ambulance forward, and drove us four blocks west to Lincoln Street, just past the Hotel America. Her left turn around the corner felt brilliant, as smooth as a July boat ride on Minter Lake. The engine sighed with satisfied little pop-pop-pops.
“You’re doing brilliantly, you see?” I asked. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
The steel tracks and railway-crossing sign glowed up ahead in the light of the moon. Nela’s breathing heightened. Her fingers whitened on the steering wheel. The ambulance slowed and whined.
“Keep driving,” I said in the voice I typically reserved for piano pupils whose fingers tripped over keys. “There’s no need to stop until just before we reach the tracks. We’ll look and listen for signs of any locomotives, and then you’ll guide the ambulance straight over those tracks, the same way you set off down Willow Street without a hitch. Keep the clutch lever straight up, in neutral.”
I heard the sounds of whispering beside me and realized Addie was reciting the Lord’s Prayer under her breath. The car jerked and sputtered with Nela’s dimming confidence.
“Keep the clutch pedal pushed all the way forward in first gear,” I said, “and you won’t stall. You’ll simply stop for a moment so we can listen for trains. Keep going a little farther.”
Nela propelled the ambulance forward with too much throttle. We came so close to those tracks, I could have practically reached out to touch them.
“Stop!” I cried.
She slammed her foot against the brake, and our heads whipped forward on our necks.
“Cholera!” Nela smacked the steering wheel with the palms of her hands.
“What?” I leaned forward and squinted into the darkness. “Do you see signs . . . ? Are people now sick from cholera, too?”
“No, it’s a Polish way to swear. I don’t like sitting this close to the tracks. Cholera jasna!”
“Oh, Jesus.” Addie braced her hands against the dashboard. “Don’t scare us to death with your swear words, too, Nela.”
“It’s all right.” I gasped and rubbed a stitch in my left side. “The engine didn’t stall, so you’ll just need to adjust the levers and roll us forward. Addie, you keep y
our eyes and ears positioned to the right, and I’ll watch the left. There aren’t any patients in the back of the ambulance, correct?”
“Nope, it’s empty,” said Addie, scooting toward the open doorway.
“Where are you going?” I grabbed her by the arm.
“She doesn’t trust me.” Nela squirmed. “No one should trust me. I’m going to put us straight in the path of a train again.”
“I’m not leaving—I’m right here,” said Addie, but she twisted her body to the right and clamped her hand around the side bar, as if ready to eject herself from the ambulance at a moment’s notice.
I scanned the dark expanse of tracks to the left and strained to hear whether a whistle pierced the night air in the distance. A bat screeched its eerie cry from somewhere in the black sky overhead, but the tracks lay silent.
Just to be certain, in case Addie was getting too ready to jump to pay close enough attention, I checked the right side, too.
“I don’t see or hear any signs of a train,” I said. “We’re clear.”
Addie whimpered and started right back up with the Lord’s Prayer. Nela gasped for air like a fish thrown on land.
“Just relax. It’s all right.” I cupped my fingers around the back of Nela’s hand. “Sing a song to calm yourself if you need to.”
“I only know Polish songs. That damned America Protective League will drag me away if I start singing in Polish this close to North Buchanan.” She clutched the steering wheel with all her might and continued to breathe in a panic. She even burped from sucking in so much air. I worried she might vomit.
“‘Father and I went down to camp,’” sang Addie in a small voice beside me. “‘Along with Captain Gooding . . .’”
I turned my face toward her and saw her wide-open eyes peering at mine through the darkness.
Addie continued: “‘And there we saw the men and boys . . .’”
I nodded and joined in. “‘As thick as hasty pudding.’”
Nela’s left hand grabbed hold of the emergency brake.
“‘Yankee Doodle keep it up,’” I sang with Addie, and we craned our necks to see down the tracks. “‘Yankee Doodle dandy / Mind the music and the step . . .’”
