Isabel’s War

by Lila Perl

  My mother reaches for my shoulder and hustles me across the threshold, while my father grunts irritably from one of the twin beds, where I’ve probably ruined his pre-dinner nap.

  “It all happened while you were at the lake,” my mother explains quietly but none too apologetically. She sits down on the other twin bed and motions for me to do the same. “You see, the Frankfurters arrived late this afternoon with this wonderful surprise, their niece.” Harriette Frankfurter is my mother’s best friend. “She was smuggled out of Germany in 1939 and has been living in England. They finally got her over here to live with them. She has no other family, poor thing.”

  “Okay,” I say hesitantly. “But what has that got to do with me having to share a room, when I was promised I’d have one all to myself.”

  “Isabel, how can you be so selfish? For one thing, the Moskins are short of rooms right now. And Helga is fourteen. So she really shouldn’t have to share with her aunt and uncle.”

  “Fourteen,” I snap. “She’s too old for me. I don’t think we’d be such good roommates. And her English is kind of…well, stiff.”

  “Nonsense,” my mother cuts in. “She’s a lovely child. I had quite a conversation with her myself. You and Ruthie and Helga will make a wonderful threesome. And you’ll have a companion when Ruthie is busy with her duties. Don’t you have any feeling at all for somebody who’s been through a terrible time in this war? Go back to your room and be as nice as you can to her. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  I’m still grumbling to myself about the war, the war, and how it’s causing so many problems and annoyances, when Helga and I cross over in the slanting sunlight to Moskin’s main building where the dining room is located. Believe me, though, it’s nothing fancy, just big and buzzing with noisy conversation, as the guests of Shady Pines whet their appetites with glasses of tinkling water and vigorously tear apart Minnie Moskin’s home-baked rolls.

  Helga is wearing a flowered chiffon dress that is much too pretty and dressed up for the occasion. But I didn’t say anything to her. Maybe it’s all she has in the way of dress-up clothing. I have no idea what people have been wearing in wartime Germany and England, but I imagine it’s something drab and practical.

  We head for the big round table where my parents and Mr. and Mrs. Frankfurter, Helga’s aunt and uncle, are already seated, watching our approach with appraising eyes. Everybody oohs and aahs at how lovely Helga looks. Before they can say a word about me, I spot Ruthie at the far end of the dining room where the Moskin family has its own table, and I dash off to tell her my news about Roy, the sailor I met in the woods.

  Ruthie is having a quick bite because she has to watch the little ones while their parents are at dinner.

  Ruthie’s eyes widen. “Really? A sailor. How old do you think? Cute?”

  “Very. You’ll see. I’m sure he’ll show up at the social hall later.”

  Ruthie nods in the direction of the table where Helga is sitting and chatting with my parents and her aunt and uncle. “What about her?”

  “Oh, well, I don’t think she’s his type. She’s sort of foreign, you know. Anyhow, I’m still recovering from the shock of having her dumped on me like that. I was supposed to have my own room, you know.”

  Back at the table, my mother gives me a sour look. “What was so important that you had to tell Ruthie?” She turns to Helga. “You must excuse my daughter. Her manners…well, she tends to be a little impulsive.”

  Helga looks at me forgivingly. I doubt if she even knows the English word impulsive. Meantime, Harry the waiter is bearing down on us with a tray laden with plates of soup. Harry, with his polished black hair, his dark seamy face, his swirling dancer’s movements, has been the headwaiter at Moskin’s ever since I can remember.

  “So Miss Isabel, who’s your new friend, the beauty?” Harry asks me familiarly as he elegantly sets a brimming soup plate down in front of Helga.

  “She’s Helga. From Germany,” I reply.

  Harry is already halfway around the table, and my parents and the Frankfurters are filling in the details of Helga’s presence at Moskin’s. With his free hand, Harry lifts two fingers to his lips and tosses a kiss of approval in Helga’s direction.

  I turn to Helga. “Don’t mind him,” I tell her confidentially. “Harry is such an old flirt. He blows kisses to all the ladies around here. He does it for the tips, you know.”

  But Helga isn’t really listening to me. Nor has she touched her soup. She’s looking up at one of the busboys who’s been standing, mesmerized, just behind Harry’s shoulder. I think his name is Ted. And Ted’s gaze, in turn, is riveted on Helga.

  Aha, I think to myself. So this is how it’s going to be. Helga, the pale green-eyed beauty, the waif, the teenage princess from abroad, adored and admired by men from sixteen to sixty. And me, the twelve-year-old kid, with the semi-developed body, a mop of black hair, and a nose that’s just crying out for a plastic surgeon who can be spared from the front lines.

  The evening meal at Moskin’s goes on much longer than usual tonight. People from other tables come over to talk to the Frankfurters and to question Helga with curious, pitying expressions on their faces. “Did you ever see Hitler, that bum?” one of the guests inquires.

  Helga shakes her head, mouthing a silent no and explains that she lived in a medium-sized city in northern Germany before she was spirited away to England with other children of endangered or broken families. Nobody, of course, asks what happened to Helga’s parents and the rest of her family in Germany. They may by now be in a prison camp or even dead. Probably no one really knows, not even the Frankfurters.

  All this time, Helga has hardly eaten a thing. A few spoonfuls of soup, a chicken wing, some peas and carrots. “You have no appetite?” another hovering Moskin guest wants to know. “No wonder you’re thin as a rail.”

  To my surprise, Helga stares back at the woman almost angrily. “We don’t eat like this in England, and not in Germany either before leaving. Here in America….”

  Helga’s Aunt Harriette breaks in apologetically. “What Helga’s trying to say is that we haven’t felt the brunt of the war here yet. Our food is much too rich for her after the wartime diet she’s accustomed to.”

  Helga just lowers her eyes. “Thank you, Aunt Hattie,” she says, after the nosy-body leaves the table, only to make way for others.

  I suppose it is hard to be the center of attention, although of course I wouldn’t know. The one thing that’s on my mind at the moment is how late it’s getting and what if Roy has already arrived at the Shady Pines social hall with nobody there to greet him.

  “You’ll all have to excuse me,” I blurt out suddenly. “I just remembered something terribly important.”

  “Isabel,” my mother says in a warning tone, “I hope you’re not being rude.”

  “No, no,” I assure her. “I’d be rude if I didn’t take care of this…um, problem, right now.”

  I dash out into the lobby of the main building and look around quickly for a glimpse of Roy in his sailor garb. A few guests have already set up card games and others are sitting and talking in groups, the men smoking their after-dinner cigars. It’s already dusk as I make my way across the bumpy lawns of Shady Pines, out past the Annex, and beyond it to the squat wooden building that was the scene of so much fun last summer. By this time in the evening, the band at Moskin’s would have begun playing catchy tunes from the Hit Parade of 1941 and even earlier…peppy songs like “Boo Hoo” and “The Love Bug Will Bite You (If You Don’t Watch Out).”

  I race up the wooden steps of the casino, which is dimly lit and not very inviting from the outside. Would Roy even know that this was the fun palace with all the “action” that I described to him this afternoon? Nobody is here, nobody, that is, except a handful of little kids, mainly the eight-and ten-year-olds from the lake. Some of them are fooling with the jukebox, trying to get it to play without putting money in. Others are jumping off the stage, scrambling back up, and jumpin
g off again.

  “Quels stupides!” I mutter under my breath. I grab one of the little boys. “Listen,” I say, “did you see a sailor come in here, a young fellow in a white Navy uniform?”

  “Nah,” says the kid, with a snide grin. “Whaddya think, the fleet’s in? Don’tcha know the whole U.S. Navy’s in the Pacific fightin’ the Japs?”

  I turn away in disgust and go sit in the dark on the casino steps until Ruthie finally turns up a good half-hour later. She sits down beside me. “He didn’t show, huh?”

  “You’re sure you didn’t see him anywhere around the main building?”

  “No, I looked everywhere on my way over here. He was probably too shy. Or he couldn’t find his way in the dark.”

  “Or,” I say, in quiet despair, “who’s going to bother keeping a promise to a twelve-year-old girl with a chest that’s too small and a nose that’s too big?”

  Three

  Early the next morning I’m awakened by the sound of stealthy but distinct movement coming from Helga’s side of the room. I open one eye and glare at her. She’s sitting on her bed fully dressed in very short khaki shorts, a heavy dark green sweater, and is pulling on a pair of leather lace-up hiking boots.

  Her legs are entirely bare and, as she gets to her feet, I can’t help noticing how long, slender and yet well-developed they are. “Ach. I’m sorry, Isabel, if I woke you.”

  Ach. This is the first expression in German that I’ve heard from Helga.

  “Where are you going?” I ask suspiciously. “It’s barely light out.”

  “To make a morning walk,” she says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to go tramping across the countryside two hours before breakfast. “You should come. It’s very healthy. Shall I wait for you to dress?”

  I turn over and fling the covers across my head. “No thanks,” I wave at her with one hand. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  But somehow Helga has wrecked my early morning sleep pattern. I toss around in bed for half an hour or so. Then I’m wide awake, so I get up and start wandering around our room. I know it’s wrong of me, but I can’t help poking through Helga’s half of the closet and in the drawers of our shared bureau. From the way Helga looked last night in her flowered chiffon dress, I had no idea she was such an outdoorsy type.

  Just as I suspected, she doesn’t have much in the way of dress-up clothing. But she has lots of drab brown shirts, with military-looking epaulets on the shoulders, and short boxy skirts to match. She has several pairs of mud-colored socks and another pair of boots. It’s almost as though Helga’s been living in some kind of uniform.

  And then there’s the sturdy cardboard box in her top drawer that says Schokoladen on it. That’s got to be German for chocolates. But it feels like it’s packed with something much heavier. It would be easy to slip the cover off and take just one peek inside. But I know that would really be going too far. And yet…one peek… How bad would that be?

  I open the door of my room and look out. The Annex porch is empty; the grounds of Shady Pines appear to be deserted. Hardly anyone is up yet. I tiptoe back to the mysterious chocolate box and gently lift up the deep-fitting cover.

  There is an old photo right on top of a family, parents and very young children. Could one of them be Helga when she was little? Other pictures, too. And there are letters, still in their neatly slit-open envelopes, with canceled stamps and with addresses in foreign-looking penmanship. Carefully, carefully, I slide one of the letters out of its envelope. But I can’t make out a word. It must be in German, and so must all the others.

  I’m just sliding the letter back into its envelope when I hear a step on the annex porch followed by a soft knock at the door. I jam the cover back onto the chocolate box, slam the bureau drawer shut much too noisily, jump back into bed, and call out in the sleepiest voice I can muster, “Who’s there?”

  Whoever it is doesn’t seem to have heard me, knocks again, and softly calls out in a woman’s voice, “Helga, are you there?” This time, I get out of bed, go to the door, and open it to find Helga’s aunt, Harriette Frankfurter, standing there with an apologetic smile on her face.

  “Ooh, sorry if I woke you, Isabel. I need to speak to Helga.”

  Harriette Frankfurter is a bosomy redhead, a sort of little pouter pigeon of a woman who always rings her eyes with black eyeliner. At this hour of the morning she’s already in full makeup, scarlet-lipped and dressed in a bright floral-patterned playsuit.

  I open the door wide to show that I have nothing to hide. “Oh, come in Mrs. Frankfurter. Except that…well, Helga isn’t here.”

  Mrs. F. makes clucking noises of disapproval when I tell her that Helga has gone on a pre-breakfast hike. “Oh dear,” she says. “It’s all that marching around, first in Germany and then in England.”

  My mind flashes on the uniform-like wardrobe in Helga’s half of the closet.

  “You mean she was in some sort of army over there?” I inquire.

  Mrs. F. nods. “In a sense. In Germany, before they found out she was half-Jewish, she was in one of those children’s fitness clubs that later became part of the Hitler Youth. Then, of course, they threw her out. She was only nine. In England, she belonged to a youth group that was connected with the military. Long marches to build up the body. The child eats practically nothing, as you saw last night. I’m worried about her.”

  Helga’s aunt sits down on the side of my bed. “So, tell me, are you two getting along all right? I hope you’ll turn out to be good friends, even if there’s a small age difference. Oh, and what I came to tell Helga this morning is that we’ll be going into the village after breakfast to pick out some pretty summer clothes for her. Maybe you’d like to come along, Isabel? I’m sure you could help us find a few stylish outfits for Helga now that she’s going to be living in America.”

  Helga, Helga, it’s all about Helga. But, of course, I agree to go along on the shopping trip. What else is there for me to do? I know I’ve been mean and grumpy and unkind in my secret thoughts. Helga has had a hard time, surely. That picture of the mother and father and the three little girls. Where are they now? Was Helga one of them, and was she the only one who escaped the Nazis?

  I’ll try, honestly I’ll try, to put myself in her shoes.

  “So where’s our pretty young lady this morning?” Harry the waiter wants to know as he flashes his way around the breakfast table with bowls of steaming farina and creamy-looking scrambled eggs. The table is loaded with fruit juices, grapefruit halves, toast, butter, jam, coffee, as well as cottage cheese, herring, and sour cream.

  Helga has not returned from her morning walk yet. Twice I’ve been sent back to the annex to look for her and once Mrs. F. has gone herself.

  “She doesn’t know the countryside around here,” Mrs. F. laments.

  Mr. F., Helga’s father’s brother, pats his wife’s hand. “Countryside is countryside. What’s the difference whether it’s over there or over here? The kid is an experienced hiker.”

  Everyone at the table keeps reassuring everyone else that Helga is fine and will be back at Moskin’s any minute. But nobody is really convinced. “You should have gone with her this morning, Isabel,” my mother remarks. “Her first time in a new place.”

  I throw an exasperated look in my mother’s direction. I could like Helga a lot more if I wasn’t constantly being reminded of something I should have done for her that I haven’t. “No, no,” Mr. and Mrs. F. break in, “it wasn’t Isabel’s responsibility.”

  Breakfast ends, and people stand around in a tight little knot trying to decide what to do and where to look for Helga. Some of the male guests volunteer to drive up and down the roads that snake in various directions leading away from Moskin’s. Others offer to comb the countryside around the lake. Someone else suggests alerting the police in the nearby village of Harper’s Falls.

  Ruthie joins me, and we go off to the annex to act as sentinels in case Helga turns up and heads directly for her room. “Such
a fuss,” I remark disgustedly, as we actually go inside for another look around and then settle down on the steps of the porch. “I could be missing for three days and nobody would notice.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Ruthie says. “And Helga’s been gone for close to three hours. Are you sure she was okay when she left?”

  “Of course she was. You’ve got to get used to the fact that she’s one of those outdoorsy types from Europe. When she says a ‘morning walk’ she probably means a ten-mile hike. I don’t see why everyone is so worried. What could possibly happen to her?”

  Ruthie glances at me sharply. “I never saw you in such a mean mood as this summer, Izzie. Anything could happen. Everything could happen. She could fall into a ditch and break a leg, she could start across a cow pasture and be charged by a bull, she could meet up with one of the inmates from the home for the feebleminded over in Boonetown and be…”

  “Be what?”

  “Well…attacked.”

  “You mean raped, don’t you?”

  “Not necessarily. Just, well you know, scared to death.”

  “I can’t believe they’d let those people roam all over the place unless they were sure they were harmless.”

  “Well, that’s what I mean. They could be harmless but Helga wouldn’t know that. They drool a lot and they hold on really tight when they grab you…”

  My hands go flying to my forehead. This is beginning to sound serious. I can already see Helga screaming with pain in a ditch beside the road where no one can see her or hear her, or clutching her stomach which has been gored bloody by a mad bull, or wrestling with some slimy-mouthed retard in a lonely clearing deep in the woods. How could I be so lacking in imagination, so completely blind to the terrible possibilities lurking in this new world to which Helga has come from so far away to be safe.

  In the midst of all my mental turmoil, Ruthie is suddenly nudging me urgently. “Look, look. Is that him?”