His irises are so blue it’s like they froze solid up in the Ardennes, but the whites are yellowed and bloodshot. He looks so unwell, yet gazes up at Bena with seeming tenderness. “My baby?” His eyes lose focus, as if he’s spotted this baby in Bena’s hair or on the wall, but he smiles, and in that smile Bena sees what she needs to see: amazement, readiness, joy. When he drifts off to sleep, Bena walks home, head held high for the first time in weeks. She doesn’t know how badly Dave is wounded—she hopes bad enough to be sent home—but a porthole is opening out, and by the time she’s at rue des Brebis she’s envisioning herself as Mrs. David Daley, with baby Mignon, if it’s a girl. And, of course, for a boy, Michel.
Later, she’ll curse her own uncharacteristic optimism, an indulgence for which she’s punished. Next day at the hospital, Dave’s not where she left him. Annoyed to have to find him again in this chaos, anxiety edging in like wind at her coat seams, she scans the gym in an orderly fashion, up one row and down the next, until she’s passed every man and not set eyes on Dave. “Excusez-moi?” she asks a nurse. “David Daley?” The nurse narrows her eyes, trying to make sense of these words—Da vie d’allie? D’a vida lit?—until finally Bena says, “Un homme. Prénom, David. Nom de famille, Daley.” The nurse’s face widens in comprehension, but then she waves Bena off: “If he’s here, he’s here,” so Bena surveys the enormous room again, going from bed to bed: “David Daley? Excusez-moi? Connaissez-vous Dave Daley?”
Near the spot where Dave lay yesterday, a man whose face looks mauled by animals calls out, “She say Daley?” He glances to his buddies. “She looking for Daley?”
Bena whirls around, excited. “Dave Daley? Oui, je cherche Dave Daley!”
The man’s lacerated face draws in, lips pursed as far as his scabs allow. “Aw, honey . . . it was some infection or something. Jeez, I’m sorry. He died last night. Mort. He’s mort. Dead.”
Bena gasps. And maybe it’s the way she moves that tips him off, for the scratch-faced man glances at her belly, then back up to her face. “Aw, sweetheart, you his girl? Amour? Oh, hell.” He looks about to cry, and for a moment Bena thinks she will too, until she makes herself remember it’s not the truth. She’ll forget this story, and begin another.
In January, a Brit called Pete G’schwind comes through. Usually, when their clothes were dry, the men went back to their barracks, but last fall Pete G’schwind stayed all night upstairs with Bena. In bed, the men mostly just knew how to please themselves, but Pete G’schwind also tended to Bena’s pleasure—not to be taken lightly in wartime, maybe anytime. Entering her throughout the night—twice, three times, again, like he couldn’t stop, saying, “Oh, God,” and “I love you,” and “My God, I love you.” When Pete again shows up in town, he’s in the hospital with a badly frostbitten left foot and no right foot at all, but neither seems to bother him; he’s headed home. Grizzled as a woodsman, he won’t let anyone near him with a razor: “You got my foot, now you want my beard, too?” Bena catches him when he’s wheeling himself to the lavatory, but he cuts her off mid-tale, lifting the dog tags from his chest, a wedding ring waggling on the chain. “But my darling, I’ve already got children. I’m married, my love.” His eyes, for a second, seem to focus right on her. “Oh, but you are lovely, aren’t you? So sorry, darling, really, truly, I am.”
IN THE END, it’s Cliff Johnston who finds Bena. February 1945: Dresden is firebombed, and that’s the mission Lieutenant Clifford O. Johnston of Deacon, Iowa, has just accomplished, ending his tour of duty. He’s got his orders, is nearly the fuck out of Frenchie-land, but makes one last stop in V——bourg, where he knows a girl he’d sure like to throw another fuck into before he sets off stateside, goes home, marries his high school girl, and spends his life farming Daddy’s fields, like his daddy’s daddy before him. For the rest of his life, Cliff will love to watch crop dusters fly over Iowa, raining down their poison chemicals, for it’ll stir a nostalgic pride, take him back to the war, seeing the pests of Iowa kablooeyed, just like Dresden, to oblivion. But right now all Cliff Johnston’s thinking about is throwing one last fuck into a big-titted Frenchie and finish this war up right. So he stops in V——bourg, delivers some supplies. He’s got a whole afternoon to kill and a bottle of French cognac to kill it with, so he goes to find the girl with the great big parley-voo tits to throw himself a send-off. Imagine Bena’s surprise when, after months of stalking the makeshift hospital, searching transport convoys for any man she’s ever bedded, Cliff Johnston walks up rue des Brebis and knocks on the tailor shop’s door. He’s from the middle of the list, between Sid Grogin and James Cork, and he’s here, looks healthy, is holding himself tall, with a swagger, ’cause he just bombed the living shit out of them Krauts. He’s pleased as fucking peach punch to see Bernadette, whose tits, he’d swear, are even bigger than—when was that? Christmastime? Oh, if she isn’t just what the army doctor ordered!
Cliff’s spirits are high, in bed beside this fulsome mademoiselle, the thrill of the firebombs still coursing in his veins, Europe nearly behind him. He’s twenty years old and this may be the best fucking mood of his life. The room’s light is soft, dappled, and it’s blissfully warm under the rabbit spread, a hell of a lot nicer than he’s used to. Spent, Cliff spoons around Bena, drapes an arm over and palms her belly, cups it like a pumpkin in his big hand. He’s a farm boy, Cliff Johnston, knows cows and pigs, husbandry and breeding. “How come everyone’s starving and you’re plumped up like a Christmas goose?” This is a compliment; it was another time.
It takes much effort, but Bena turns to face him with a combination of trepidation and joy, and they speak at the same time, him saying, “You’re not . . . ?” and her saying, “Baby.”
Blame it on the moment. Blame it on the war. Blame it on some MGM-concocted notion of what a real American man does when a pretty naked lady tells him she’s knocked up and it doesn’t cross his mind that he’s maybe not the only guy who’s been knocking. Blame it on Cliff’s never having been all that thrilled with his Becky back home and her wilted-parsnip tits, but when he gets the notion his seed’s taken root in this luscious French hottie, he lets out a whoop that Bena wouldn’t know from pain if not for the irrepressible grin lighting his face like a firebomb. She doesn’t have to convince him. It’s more of a fairy tale than she’s let herself dream.
With a grandiose flourish Cliff leaps from the covers and swoops to one knee beside the bed, wrapping himself in the rabbit blanket. Teeth chattering, he takes Bena’s hand. “Well, then, Mademoiselle Bernadette. I guess that means we’ll be getting married!” And though Bena doesn’t know all the words he’s used, she grasps the sentiment just fine. And then she’s laughing, for the first time in ages she’s laughing, and saying “Oui!” saying “Yes!” as if he’s asked a question.
They leave the next day, but beforehand she’ll run to the barn and free the rabbits. Chou-Chou will feast on fresh rabbit till he’s ancient and portly. He’ll still be there on rue des Brebis in the 1950s when Michel finally makes it home. It’ll be years more before Michel is able to find Virginie and get her out of the institution where she’s been stashed since ’44. Chou-Chou’s a scrappy survivor, living on rabbit all that time. Chou-Chou Chat, bunny-tending cat, long dead by now, of course, but the bunnies in the hutch out back on rue des Brebis are surely the infinite-great-grandbunnies of Jean Armond’s wartime rabbits. And inside the house that was once the tailor’s, there just might be a rabbit stew simmering on the stove right now, a homemade meal for the lunch guest of the elderly Armond twins. They’re hosting the handsome American professor of history who’s come all this way to hear about their lives.
BENA AND CLIFF are married by a chaplain en route to the port at Le Havre. Now, Cliff’s not all that bright, and it probably seems only fair to him that with all he’s done for his country, his country’ll grant his wife a berth on the ship home, but when they reach Le Havre he’s met with a very different reality. The reality of Request for Permission to Marry, section 2
, subsection (b): “The United States Government is obligated in no way to transport the wife or dependents to the United States during the present emergency.” The reality of: “You gotta be kidding me, soldier.”
“Look,” Cliff tells the clerk, “I’m decorated military, going home, and she’s coming.”
“Look,” says the clerk, who volleys like this daily, “you want that? What’s in it for me?” For there’s a way around every regulation, and it so happens the clerk’s got something he needs flown somewhere, ASAP. “Boost me up my ladder,” he says, “maybe I’ll boost you up yours.”
Before leaving on the clerk’s errand, Cliff makes a phone call, Le Havre to Iowa. “Hey, Ma—no, everything’s fine. Hey, hang on, wait, I got news. First is that I’m coming home. Yeah, and the other is—hey, don’t go yelling or anything, okay? Becky’s not over there, is she? Okay, so, I’m a married man! Hey! Hey, hang on—wait. Ma . . . look. Look, Ma . . . Hey, just wait a sec. Hang on. Look: I’m gonna be a father. Uh-huh . . . yup, a great girl . . . Bernadette . . . No, Ber-na-dette. Yeah, French . . . I know it is, Ma. No, yes—a chaplain. No, well, no, I don’t guess she’s real religious. Just a, you know, a Christian. I don’t know, Ma. She doesn’t got family. They’re gone—I don’t—just gone, okay? Um, around December. Sure, three months, sure. So, yeah, I guess September, yeah. Hey, so, I kinda wondered—about Becky . . . You’re better at that stuff than me. She’ll . . . no, Ma, wait . . . it’d be better from you, okay? Bernadette. I don’t . . . just Bernadette Johnston, okay? French, Ma, okay, for chrissake . . . Dunno—end of the month? Not by Easter, but—okay . . . Ma! Tell everyone hi, ’kay? And you’ll tell Becky? You’re the best, Ma.”
Cliff takes off on the port clerk’s bidding, but it seems the clerk’s got a bid for Bernadette, too, and she doesn’t need any English to grasp what he wants: he wants thanks for getting her on that ship. She knows what to do. After all the men in V——bourg, he’s just one more.
There’s no cure like travel? Tell that to Bena, seasick across the Atlantic as they move in a military convoy aboard a repurposed cruise liner. She spends the frigid March voyage on deck, barfing over the rail, wrapped in her rabbit fur shawl. When they dock at New York harbor, port authorities refuse the putrid pelt entry into the United States. It’s an ugly fight, like taking a blanket from a screaming child. Filthy immigrant, one cop says to another. She’s probably a Jew, says the other, with some pity. Should we let her keep it? I don’t care if she’s the Queen of Sheba—no! And that’s the end of the rabbit fur quilt, rest its moldy bunny souls.
An overnight train to Chicago, then another four hours into Iowa. No one would take this traveling couple for married, Bena’s near-term pregnancy notwithstanding. They don’t even talk, let alone touch. Cliff mostly sleeps, and everything about Bena says Don’t come near. Cliff probably thinks that’s just how pregnant broads are. What does he care? He’s alive! A hero on his way home from war, a good-looking girl beside him, proof of his manliness on display. She and this baby will be a good buffer between him and his family, a cushion against his childhood and the childhood sweetheart he never was all that sweet on. Cliff’ll work the farm like always, and his dad will help with a down payment on a house. Hell, he might even get a hometown parade.
Cliff’s father, a man of vague, limp goodwill, greets the newlyweds at the train. Shy as a novice porter, Harlan Johnston takes Bernadette’s small bag, all she has in the world. Nothing like packing a suitcase and sailing away . . . He barely nods when Cliff introduces her, keeps his head down as if it would constitute a certain obscenity to regard straight-on a woman so fecund. “She don’t have much English,” Cliff tells him, and Harlan says, “No, I don’t guess she would.”
Vida Johnston, waiting in the truck, is not altogether unlike Bernadette: capable, wary, stubborn. By way of hello, she rolls down her window: “Car’s in the shop, or we’d of come in it ’stead of this. You going to introduce this—” A stream of disorderly consonants emerges from her mouth as she eyes Bena’s belly. Whether in ignorance or in a cunning takedown, Vida decides Bernadette’s name is Brenda, with an extra da on the end, and won’t hear different. She deems it dangerous for “a girl in Brendada’s condition” to ride in back of a pickup, so while Cliff sits in the truck bed and watches the fields, Bernadette is wedged between the Johnstons inside on the bench seat. She and Vida are both squat and wide, Harlan’s a big-and-tall, and it’s three hours to the farm. And Vida, for one, won’t waste breath on a knocked-up girl what can’t even speak English. She suspects the tart’s got tricks up her ratty sleeves. Just that morning she said, “Harlan, I bet we come to find she’s one of them Jews, using Clifford to get herself out of Europe over there.” Harlan, who picks up a newspaper from time to time, said, “War’s near over. They’re letting the Jews go free. Cliff wouldn’t have relations with a Jew girl anyhow, that’s silliness.” Now the girl’s here, though, Harlan can see, Jew or whatnot, she’s fine-looking, a sure improvement on Becky Boyer. Hell, you get some bourbon into him, he might admit wanting to throw a fuck into Frenchie himself. But Harlan doesn’t drink, and honesty, he knows, can be dicey at best.
BERNADETTE’S FIRST SPRING WEEKS in Iowa are remarkably peaceful. The Johnston farm is nothing fancy, but the house is clean, the kitchen porch a nice place to sit. She takes her chores to the table out there, to chop carrots or knead bread dough or roll a pie crust without Vida over her shoulder. Cliff and Harlan work long days on the farm. Vida tends house, one eye on Bernadette. Vida birthed plenty of children herself; she knows from pregnancy. Bena may be the Armond baby, but she knows nothing of birthing them and tries to think of it as little as possible. When her chores are done, she occupies herself making clothes for the baby she’s not thinking about from scraps in Vida’s sewing room. Bena’s dressed in hand-me-downs from Vida and her sisters and cousins and aunts, all of whom have borne their share of babies, all asking, “How far along she say she is?”
“Due in September’s what she claims,” Vida says, pious as a TV preacher.
Taking another gander, Vida’s guest whispers like a bad stage actor, “September?”
Vida raises her eyebrows, leans in closer, says, “You think she looks like a Jew?”
Another glance, the woman shrugs. “Don’t know I ever saw one but in the movies.”
“Hm.” Vida’s not an entirely ignorant woman. She seriously doubts Cliff’s so-called marriage is legal in America. This whole France place feels made-up, part of Brendada’s ruse. Cliff can’t see things for how they are, but Vida thinks it won’t be long before certain truths reveal themselves. The girl’s up five, six times a night to make water—don’t think Vida isn’t counting. It was like that in her own pregnancies, near the end. Vida prays for Brendada’s baby: that it’s born soon, and it’s the biggest, least-premature baby Deacon, Iowa, has ever seen.
Spring of ’45 is busy: Roosevelt’s death, Hitler’s suicide, VE Day, and finally there is a parade in Deacon, and Cliff’s practically the star, waving from Becky Boyer’s father’s convertible, because even the Boyers are being nice. Becky, too. Cliff doesn’t totally understand, thinks it’s because he’s basically a hero and everything. He’s got no idea what-all his mother’s said to the Boyers, Cliff’s just feeling good, riding this thing out. Bernadette’s a sourpuss, sure, but not much trouble. That is, until suppertime on the May afternoon when she goes into labor.
“Early, isn’t it?” says Harlan.
“Yep,” says Vida.
“You sure?” Cliff asks Bernadette, who grunts confirmation through gritted teeth.
Vida says Cliff should drive Brendada in the car, since the hospital’s a ways and the truck’s shocks’re bad, but all the sudden Cliff’s a nervous wreck, and it takes Vida a minute to figure it out: he thinks the baby’s coming way too early. “What if something happens?” he keeps saying, until Vida agrees to ride along. Probably for the best—Cliff might need things explained to him. Vida would like to think he’s a trustin
g soul, but sometimes she’s afraid he’s simply a fool.
So Cliff and Vida and Brendada set off in the car, Vida sitting prim and tall in the front seat, Brendada heaving like a tipped cow in back, Vida fighting to contain her giddiness and keep from gloating. To distract herself from Brendada’s bovine moans, Vida rolls down the window and sings hymns into the rushing air. Maybe their message will reach Brendada; the Lord never faulted anyone for trying. “I dreamed that the great judgment morning had dawned and the trumpet had blown. I dreamed that the nations had gathered to judgment before the white throne.” By the chorus, Vida’s having a fine time, tapping hand to thigh. “And O, what a weeping and wailing, as the lost were told of their fate. They cried for the rocks and the mountains, they prayed but their prayer was too late.” She’s just starting in on “Too many, Lord, abuse Thy grace” when Cliff says maybe Bernadette could use some quiet, and Bernadette nods through her pain. Vida sucks her lips and stays mum; she’s got to keep on Cliff’s good side.
Nothing moves fast enough on the drive, but once they get there it all goes double time, contractions included. Bena’s hoisted into a wheelchair and swept inside so fast Cliff’s left calling feebly, “See ya later.” Vida collects the girl’s things; they hardly fill a cardboard valise.
Cliff parks the car, then joins Vida in the waiting room. A moment alone to think, and he’s worked himself up. “Ma,” he asks, “can a baby, y’know, make it, so early?” but when Vida pats the chair beside her, saying, “It’s in the Lord’s hands,” Cliff howls in terror: “The Lord’s?”
“Oh, stop,” she scolds. “I don’t mean dead! Just that it’s God’s will,” but Cliff’s dashing for the nurses’ station. “I’m looking for my wife. She’s having a baby . . . Bernadette Johnston?”
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 22
