Isabel’s War

by Lila Perl

  I take my hands away from my forehead and follow her pointing finger. There, just at the corner of the annex, walking with a comfortable swagger in his dazzling sailors’ whites in our direction, is none other than Roy. And beside him, trotting along rather slowly and with a bandaged left leg, is Helga.

  Other people have also witnessed their approach. “Oh my goodness, it’s our Helga,” Harriette Frankfurter bursts out, tearing across the lawn from the main house. Ruthie and I are on our feet. People are coming together from all directions. Helga and Roy are soon encircled.

  “You brought her back to us,” Mrs. F. exclaims. “Oh, you dear boy. Where did you find her? She’s limping and so pale. Helga, Helga, what happened to you?”

  A chair is brought and Helga is lowered into it. Another chair appears and Roy gently lifts Helga’s bandaged leg to rest on its seat.

  “She wasn’t hurt bad,” Roy, clearly the hero, tells the crowd. “It was a farm dog. They can get pretty mean, though, you know. So when we heard all the barking and growling over at our summer place across the road, I started off for the farm. Sure enough, she was on the ground and he had her by the calf.”

  Mrs. F. is wringing her hands and Mr. F. is trying to steady her. “Helga is so frightened of dogs,” her aunt says. “The Nazis, you know. With their terrible killer guard dogs.” Mrs. F. lowers her voice. “But we won’t speak of that now.”

  “Nein, nein,” Helga whispers to the concerned faces bending over her. “Not such a big dog as in Germany.”

  Roy folds his arms and looks down on Helga with concern. “Big enough. And he really got his teeth into her. So I borrowed a car and took her into town. Got the doc to stitch her up and give her a tetanus shot. You never know with these farm dogs. He could have had rabies from a raccoon or even a bat. But the doc said no way.”

  By this time, Harriette F. has fainted and is lying on the grass being fanned by my mother and Mr. F. I turn to Ruthie. “Could she really get rabies?”

  Ruthie shrugs. “The doctor would know if there was any chance of that.” Her glance shifts to Roy. “Gosh, but he’s awfully cute, Izzie. And to think you were the one to find him.”

  I roll my eyes. “A lot of good that does.”

  Roy has been invited to have lunch with us at the hotel. Helga, who has been resting most of the morning, is looking a little less ghostlike. But everyone is watching her for signs of rabies, just in case the tetanus shot didn’t do the job.

  Questions are directed at her by worried well-wishers from all over the dining room. “How much does your leg hurt now?” “Is there any kind of burning sensation where you were bitten?” “Are you sure the wound isn’t infected?” “Have you got a headache?” “Can you drink water?”

  After Helga wanly assures everyone that she has no symptoms of rabies, interest focuses on Roy who, by now, admits to our meeting in the woods. He asks me how my “snake bite” is doing and did I remember to suck the venom out after I got back to Moskin’s?

  I don’t think this is very funny. And it lands me in trouble with my parents. My mother immediately demands an “explanation” and promises that we’ll “talk about this later.” Which makes me feel like a baby in front of Roy and Helga, who are the golden couple at the table.

  Both my father and Mr. F. want to know how come Roy enlisted in the Navy and whether he thinks it’s better to choose your branch of service or wait to be drafted. I know my father is thinking about my brother Arnold, who’s getting awfully close to being assigned a draft number. Roy, it turns out, is seventeen and just out of boot camp, which is why he’s on furlough waiting for an assignment, maybe in the Pacific, maybe somewhere else. Helga gazes at him worshipfully as he relates his plans for the future. He is only a raw seaman at the moment, but he might as well be an admiral as far as she’s concerned. And doesn’t Roy know it? And isn’t he just eating it up?

  Lunch is finally over and Helga has been ordered by all the grownups to go back to her room and rest. Minnie Moskin herself comes out of the kitchen with a glass of half-milk and half-cream and a tray of her thick round cookies for Helga to take to her room. Mrs. F. carries the tray for her as she limps off toward the annex, while Roy stands looking after Helga wistfully.

  I rush up to Roy, dragging Ruthie behind me, and I introduce them. “You should have come to the casino last night. We had such a great time,” I tell him, poking Ruthie and crossing my fingers behind my back.

  “Yeah,” Roy sighs, his eyes still focused on Helga’s slowly retreating figure. “But how was I supposed to know she’d be there? I figured it would just be a bunch of kids or a lot of older folks.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot,” I reply. Even Ruthie looks hurt at Roy’s remark. “So how long is this furlough of yours, anyway?” I ask the great lover.

  “Just one more day.”

  “Quel dommage!” I know it’s not nice of me but I just can’t help it.

  “Whatever that’s supposed to mean,” Roy mutters as he starts sauntering off…the last he’ll probably see of Shady Pines.

  Four

  “You shouldn’t have cursed him in French like that,” says Ruthie, as Roy disappears across the road. “He’s fighting for our country. He could get killed in the Pacific. The Japanese are sinking our battleships right and left. Or don’t you read the papers?”

  “I don’t. Not the way my father does. Who can remember the difference between New Guinea and Guadalcanal? And where in the world are the Solomon Islands? Anyhow, what I said to him wasn’t a curse. Dommage is the word for pity, so all it meant was, What a pity.”

  “It sounded,” Ruthie insists, “like you called him a dummy. And very sarcastic, too.”

  Since Ruthie and I aren’t exactly on the best of terms at the moment—and she has to take her little tykes off to the playground (two rope swings and a bumpy slide) after their naps—I go slouching off to the deserted social hall to practice piano. It’s the best way I can think of to avoid waking Helga, who’s supposed to be sleeping or at least resting.

  I wish I didn’t have such mixed feelings about Helga. It’s stupid of me, of course, to be angry with her because of Roy. It isn’t her fault that she ran into an unfriendly dog and that Roy came to her rescue. And it isn’t her fault that there’s a war on in which she’s one of the victims, so that in this small world up at Moskin’s, people are centering their feelings of sympathy on her.

  I’ve been practicing my Czerny exercises for twenty minutes or so, when I hear a step behind me.

  “Oh, I thought I heard tinkling noises in here.”

  I turn around. It’s Mrs. F. She’s changed out of her colorful playsuit and is wearing an orange blouse and a tan walking skirt. “I just looked in on Helga,” she reports. “She’s up and about and says she’s well enough to go into town for our little shopping trip. I told her I’d asked you to come along and she seemed very pleased. Are you ready, Isabel?”

  It’s about half a mile from Moskin’s to Harper’s Falls along a rutted dirt road studded with stones and tree roots. Most of the guests at Shady Pines walk to town, but because of Helga’s wounded ankle, her uncle will drive the four of us in. As I soon learn, my mother is coming along, too. The only good thing about that is that maybe, maybe, she’ll buy me the pair of dungarees that I’ve been yearning for.

  As soon as we are in town, it’s pretty noticeable that the war has come to Harper’s Falls and changed it from a sleepy country village to a place of bustling activity. Banners in support of the war effort are flung across Main Street, and there is now a Red Cross center and a blood bank. Even the sleepy old railroad depot behind the five-and-ten seems to have come alive with announcements of extra trains daily.

  We’re dropped off at the town’s so-called “department store,” which is really just a single-story building, nothing at all like Macy’s or the other real department stores in New York City with their elevators and escalators to take shoppers to the upper floors filled with endless amounts of merchandise.

>   “Dungarees, hmm?” says the salesperson who I’ve rushed to approach as we walk in the door. She’s a short, stocky country woman, probably the wife of the owner. “We had a few pairs back in the spring. Might be some left. But there’s not much of a choice of sizes.”

  “What’s this all about?” my mother wants to know, as the saleswoman goes off to check the stockroom.

  “Nothing, nothing,” I reply. “They probably don’t have any.” I figure there’s no use getting into an argument over something that may not exist. Meantime, Mrs. F. has led Helga over to the resort clothing to look at playsuits, halters, shorts, slacks, and cotton skirts.

  Helga hops around on one leg inspecting the garments that her aunt takes off the counter or the rack to suggest to her. “Such bright colors,” Helga murmurs.

  “Exactly,” says Mrs. F. “We don’t have to hide ourselves in camouflage here in America. You’re safe here, Helga, safe at last. But keep in mind that the selection will get smaller and smaller as the war goes on and there will be shortages of material, even of buttons and zippers, of everything.”

  “That’s true,” says the saleswoman who went to search for my dungarees. “Buy now. Our stock of everything is running low.” She’s holding something made of dark blue cloth folded up under her arm, and I reach out to touch it.

  “Oh yes.” She turns. “Only this one pair left. It’s a small size, though.”

  “What are those?” Helga wants to know, as I grab the dungarees and head toward the curtained-off fitting room just across the floor. My mother is there even before I’ve gotten out of my shorts. I start pulling the stiff, coarse blue denim pants up my legs. They’re fine until I try getting them over my backside.

  “What on earth…” My mother is standing there with one hand under her chin and her lips pursed. “Are you crazy, Isabel? You’ll tear them. There is no way you can get into them, much less zip them up. Take those things off this minute.”

  I don’t answer her. I’m too busy tugging away. But I know it’s hopeless. Even if I got the pants zipped up, my mother wouldn’t buy them for me. And if I could somehow buy them myself, she wouldn’t let me wear them.

  The minute the dungarees have dropped to the floor, my mother is off to give them back to the saleswoman. Why, oh why, couldn’t the store have had them even one size bigger? I take my time putting my shorts back on and, just as I’m about to leave the fitting room, the curtain flutters and Helga comes hopping in, the dungarees slung over her shoulder.

  “I’m not talking to you,” I mumble to my mother as we follow Helga and Mrs. F. out of the store. They are carrying a number of purchases for Helga including, of course, the dungarees that I couldn’t fit into. “You had no business giving them to her.”

  “I didn’t,” my mother protests. “When she saw me carrying them, she asked if she could try them on. What was I supposed to say? Why are you holding such a grudge against that poor girl? What did she ever do to you?”

  I take a vow of silence where my mother is concerned and we spend the rest of the afternoon traipsing around town. Mr. F. joins us and goes to the blood bank to donate blood for the troops. Mrs. F. and my mother go into a yarn store and buy olive-colored wool to knit scarves and mittens and socks for the soldiers. Mrs. F. also buys extra knitting needles and promises to teach me to knit as soon as we get back to Moskin’s.

  My mother suggests we get some supplies from the Red Cross for making up first-aid kits. We’ll roll bandages and stuff during our vacation at Shady Pines and then return the kits when they’re ready for use in case of an enemy attack at home or on the front lines. Finally we get into Mr. F.’s car with all our packages and head back to Moskin’s.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Mrs. F. and I sit under a tree and she teaches me how to cast the yarn onto my two long knitting needles and how to knit and purl, the two basic stitches. I’m making, Mrs. F. tells me, a scarf for some G.I., a soldier in the U.S. Army, who will one of these days invade Europe and take it back from Hitler and the Nazis, who have been grabbing everything they can from Russia to France.

  With all the stitches I’m dropping and all the help I need from Mrs. F., it’s just as well that an invasion of Europe is going to take a couple of years at least. I’m terrible at the “womanly arts” and I’m afraid it’s going to be a very long war.

  Meantime, my mother and some of the other ladies are sitting nearby rolling bandages for the Red Cross. Helga, after her shopping spree in Harper’s Falls, has of course been sent to our room to rest.

  “Helga, Helga, psst.”

  It’s late that night and I’m dreaming of an endless skein of olive-colored wool that is threatening to strangle me, when my sleep is pierced by a soft whistle-like sound. I have no idea what time it is, only that it’s dark out and that I seem to have been asleep for hours. As I toss over onto my right side, I hear the sound again, followed quickly by an almost inaudible “Shh.”

  Something is going on, and I instantly smother the instinct to jump up and make inquiries.

  “Helga, come on out. Can’t you?”

  It’s the first voice again, and it seems to be coming from the window that is almost directly above my head, which looks out onto the pine forest behind the annex.

  “Ach, nein. It’s too dangerous.”

  Helga’s voice is so close that it almost feels as though she’s in bed with me. Actually, she must be crouching on the floor just beneath the window between our two beds.

  “Then I’ll come in. Is she fast asleep? Is the door open?”

  “Nein, nein, you cannot. Wait, I come out. I meet you in the back.”

  I don’t dare move. I can hear Helga softly rustling into some sort of garment and tiptoeing out the front door, which she gently closes.

  There’s only a narrow thorny space between the back of the annex and the pinewoods, where Roy has somehow managed to get to our window. Where will they go now…will Helga join him near the window or will they go deeper into the forest? Or do they have some other place for a rendezvous?

  My heart is pounding as I crawl out of bed, listening for the sound of their voices. I peer out the rear window…nothing. I even open the door a crack. No one is in sight. Perhaps I was only dreaming that Helga left our room in the middle of the night to be with Roy. But I give Helga’s bed a poke and sure enough, it’s empty.

  Time passes. I’m so flustered at catching Helga playing Juliet to Roy’s Romeo that I don’t know how I feel about my discovery. In one way it’s exciting…a mystery. She’s only known him one day and already there’s a certain intimacy between them. What has drawn them together so strongly that he would sneak back to Moskin’s in the dark to be with her?

  But while I’m looking for answers, I’m also having envious thoughts toward Helga. I’m even going so far as to wonder if I’m going to tell on her. Does she have to have everything…a great figure, stunning hair and eyes, the concern and sympathy of all the guests at Moskin’s, tossed kisses from Harry the waiter and hot-eyed stares from the busboys, my dungarees, and Roy?

  I get back into bed and crawl under the covers, keeping my ears open for Helga’s return. I’ve decided I’ll play dead when she comes back and see if I can read any signs of what’s going on when I see her in the morning.

  Did I fall asleep again? I must have. Because the next thing I know I’m awakened by a funny squeaking sound. There are tiny animals, field mice especially, that easily find their way into the rooms at Moskin’s.

  I sit up in bed and reach for the fly swatter that hangs on a hook above me. It’s still completely dark out. How am I going to shoo the creature out, whatever it is, without knowing where it is? I’m just about to reach for the flashlight under my pillow, when I hear the squeaking again. This time, though, it’s followed by a sniffle. Squeak…sniffle. Squeak…sniffle. Squeak…sniffle. There’s a rhythm that isn’t exactly mouse-like.

  I get out of bed, pad across the short distance to Helga’s bed, and give it a poke, like the last
time, but maybe just a little bit harder.

  There’s a shriek. Helga sits up in bed.

  “Oh,” I gasp. “It’s you.”

  Helga’s voice is throaty. “Ach, Isabel, I’m sorry if I’ve waked you.”

  I can tell for sure now that she’s been crying or at least weeping.

  “Waked me. Well, not exactly. Um, is anything wrong?”

  Helga’s long hair is tangled around her face and chest. I can see that much in the dark. And her face is pale. “Only my leg aches a bit,” she explains. “I went to the bathhouse to bathe it with cool water. And also,” she adds, “to use the toilet.”

  Aha, I think to myself. So that’s where Helga and Roy had their romantic rendezvous tonight, in the rough wooden building that is used by the annex guests. In a flash I can see them standing together in the damp-smelling shower room with its handful of stalls and its slimy floor and walls. If that’s really where they hid out during Roy’s visit, that’s pretty pathetic.

  On the other hand, I’m burning with curiosity. Did they just sit on the flimsy wooden stools and talk to each other? Did Roy hold Helga’s hand and stroke her face? Did he embrace her; did he kiss her? Was Helga already crying when they parted?

  Will I ever know? When I look down at Helga again, she’s thrown her head back on the pillow, one arm is flung across her face, and she’s as silent as if she’s fallen into a deep sleep.

  Five

  Every morning after breakfast, my father and some of the other male guests at Moskin’s walk into Harper’s Falls to pick up their newspapers, so they can keep up with the war news. They call this exercise their “constitutional.” Afterwards they return to Moskin’s and sit on the porch all morning discussing the latest reports and chewing on their cold cigar butts from the night before.

  I’m sitting nearby struggling with my knitting because it’s too cool to go for a swim this early. “Leave it to the Marines,” my father rumbles with an air of authority, as he rustles his newspaper. “Those boys finally held off a Jap ground attack on Guadalcanal. They don’t come any tougher than that.”