Breaking the Code

by Karen Fisher-Alaniz

  Well Jonesy is still with me. I told you he was having trouble with his back. He had it checked by the local doctor who then sent him up to the hospital on the island for a complete check up and x-ray. The x-ray showed it perfectly normal as far as bone structure is concerned. However it seems there can be plenty wrong with a back that’s not discernable by the naked eye nor by x-ray. For example your trouble Dad, the sacroiliac joint can cause trouble without anything at all being visible. That seems to be Jonesy’s trouble. He was in an auto accident about same as mine and wrenched his back. Everyone says keep after them if your back really bothers you as they can’t really do much with it. Jonesy is taking some pills and two treatments a day but doc admits it isn’t going to ever do any real good except to relieve it for a while. You know he’s here just like me on “borrowed time.” Last time doc gave him 3 days more of heat treatments. And then going to check him again. Tomorrow is the check-up day—then will know. It’s a cinch they won’t send him out like he is. The hospital recommended limited services—which means a desk job in the states. Anyway he’ll know tomorrow then I’m going to work. About mail time—I’ll get this in and see if I’ve got some for a change.

  Write. Love, Murray

  I sat at my dining table and opened the notebook. Taking the first letter out, I carefully slid it into the sleeve and then put it in the new notebook I’d just bought. When the first of the worn notebooks was empty, I closed it and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. The initials R.J.F. were printed in slanted letters in one corner of the notebook. Raymond James Fisher was my dad’s little brother. Slightly above the initials was ’41. I traced it with my finger. Then the answer came to me, an answer to the question my father had asked over tortilla soup.

  “Because she didn’t know,” I said aloud. “She didn’t know if her boy would return from the war.”

  I gently turned the pages. I was taken back in time to a grandmother I’d never met, a mother who feared for her son. That’s why she had saved the letters. They were a part of him. She’d used an old two-ring notebook that my uncle had used in high school. And every time she got a letter in the mail, she’d put it in the notebook. It was proof that her beloved son, more than two thousand miles away, was still alive. She saved them because the next correspondence she received could be a telegram that started with the words “We regret to inform you…” Every letter could be the last. And when the last letter she received from him was followed by her son stepping off the train, she didn’t need them anymore. She had her son. She put the letters away—until one day she gave them back to him.

  When I finished transferring the letters to the archive-safe sleeves, I had filled four black notebooks and gone through four one hundred-packs of sleeves. My father had written more than four hundred pages of letters to his folks during the war. What a treasure they must have been to them, but especially to his mother.

  He had asked me, “Why are you doing this?” and I couldn’t answer. But slowly an answer was forming. I was finishing what my grandmother had started. Something was driving me to transcribe the letters. I thought it was for my children. And it was, but there was something more.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wednesdays with Murray

  Went to show…at the end of the reel there’s a blackout while the projectionist changes reels. And it always happens at the critical instances in the movie.—February 15, 1945

  That first Wednesday soon became a routine. Dad and I continued to eat lunch together every week for the remainder of the school year. But as summer approached and temperatures soared into the nineties, we decided that soup no longer sounded very good. Dad had heard that a local diner, Mr. Ed’s, served his all-time favorite: eggs Benedict. So we started going there for breakfast. By the time colder weather came, we had become comfortable in our new routine.

  I continued to read the letters, but I saved my questions for our weekly time together. Each Wednesday, I took out a list of questions and then gently fit them between bites of eggs Benedict and crispy hash browns. Sometimes, the answers flowed easily. But more often than not, they didn’t. I walked a fine line that was now far too familiar. His responses to the questions were completely unpredictable. Questions that I thought might upset him didn’t. Questions I didn’t think would upset him did. It seemed to be less about the subject matter and more about the memory a word or thought triggered.

  Between Wednesdays, I emailed questions to him; sometimes he responded, sometimes he didn’t. The whole system wasn’t very efficient and didn’t fit with my methodical personality. Still, my late night transcribing had finally added up to one notebook of letters completed and three to go. I went to bed each night with my neck aching and my vision blurry. It was a laborious task, trying to read his tiny handwriting, gleaning information from the letters and from him, and then attempting to form a mental timeline and keep up with the questions that popped into my head relentlessly. And then there was the military jargon and the 1940s language that I didn’t understand.

  My husband had been right when he worried this would take a lot of time. Perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself. He knew I couldn’t simply type the letters and leave it at that. I had to understand. One letter at a time, I kept telling myself. And that’s how it went.

  I sat on my bed, pillows propped behind me and comforter pulled over my legs. I switched on the heating blanket and balanced my laptop on knees. My kitty jumped on the bed, circling a few times before curling up on my feet. I opened the word processor to the letters I’d transcribed so far. I’d finished one notebook of the original letters, one hundred pages. But as I scrolled down, I realized I wasn’t really done with them. There were many places in his letters where I couldn’t decipher his writing. Instead of stopping when I came to a place like that, I’d moved on. But now, looking at it, I hated all those blank spaces on the page.

  I dialed Dad’s number.

  “Dad,” I said, “I need to come over tomorrow.”

  “Come on over anytime,” he said.

  “You might want to hear why before you agree to this,” I said.

  “Well, as long as I don’t have to do any work,” he joked.

  “Actually,” I teased, and then added, “it is a bit of work I need from you. But I’ll do most of it.”

  I arrived the next day with my laptop and one of the notebooks.

  “OK, Dad,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

  “I don’t like the look of this,” he said. “This definitely looks like work.”

  I handed him the notebook of his letters. He looked at me as if I’d just put a snake in his lap. But I pretended not to notice. I opened my computer and scrolled down, hoping this would work.

  “Let me explain how I’ve been doing this,” I said. “Your handwriting is sometimes hard to read. So when I was typing and I came to a word or phrase I couldn’t read, I left a long line of dashes.”

  I turned the laptop around and showed him.

  “Now all I have to do is go back, delete the dashes, and fill in the blanks,” I said. “And that’s where you come in.”

  “I don’t think I can help you there.” He laughed. “I can’t read my own handwriting, you know.”

  “Well, we can at least try, right?” I asked.

  “I guess,” he replied.

  “OK,” I said. “Turn to the letter dated January 22, 1945.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “OK. Now go to the first sentence of the last paragraph,” I said.

  And so it went for the next hour. Most of the time Dad was able to fill in the unknown words easily. But sometimes it was more difficult and I’d kneel next to his chair as we read and reread the sentence, looking carefully at each letter, comparing it to others, or using the context of the sentence to figure it out.

  “You know why these are so hard to read?” he asked. “I wrote whenever I could and that was usually late at night in my bunk, with very little light.”

  “Hmm,” I said
. “That’s not how I pictured it. I pictured you at a desk or something.”

  “Actually, I rarely sat at a desk or table to write, until I started working in an office. But that was later in the war. Is there a place where my letters change from being handwritten to being typed?” he asked.

  “Yes, there is. And your typing is a lot easier to read than your handwriting,” I teased.

  We finished several letters that first day. And in the coming weeks, I found it was something I could fit between the rest of my life—between running errands and paying bills, or between grocery shopping and cleaning the house, an hour here and an hour there. It was a slow process. So many letters had accumulated that, when I had the time, I wanted to just barrel on through. Dad didn’t have the same sense of urgency. In fact, he usually ended our session before I was ready. He was always nice about it. In fact, he simply threw out hints: his back hurt, he had an errand to run, he wanted to take an afternoon nap. “Do you want to stop?” I’d ask. The answer was always yes.

  I began to suspect there was something more to the often abrupt end to our time together. But regardless of the reason, when he was done, we were done.

  Feb 15, 1945

  Dear Folks,

  Believe I wrote you once today but I have half an hour to kill before show time. Jonesy just checked with the doctor a few minutes ago and the doc took him right up to the local hospital for a few days observation. All of a sudden, just like that. It’s just a few blocks from here on the same base so I’m going to take his mail to him and visit him now and then. He probably won’t be there long.

  I really stumbled on to something today. Probably of no importance now but you never can tell. Had mail-man check my mail-card at the main post office while he was over there yesterday. He says according to that, I was assigned to the office on another base as a communication specialist. Even showed what room I worked in and everything. He said he didn’t change it because he thought I lived here and was working over there. Evidently when I was up for transfer a couple of weeks ago I was assigned to this other base. It’s just the main office of this base I’m working at now. Over all of the other small bases around here—much closer to town and much nicer surroundings. They have every fourth day off and are usually there for a year or two years or even longer. A good deal. Don’t have any idea what it will mean as far as getting a transfer when and if I leave my present location. Maybe that it’s just held open for me when I get ready to go. Sure hope so. I wouldn’t mind the place as long as I have to be in anyway.

  Didn’t do anything, as usual, today. Took a shower and shaved. I went to show and slept. The show, “To Have and Have Not” was very good. Most of the ones we see are a little old, but all of the best grade. We have two theatres—one is indoor and in one of the buildings that houses the communications school. All the buildings (with few exceptions) of any semi-permanent nature are of the Quonset hut type. You’ve probably seen ’em in shows. They are made of the corrugated tin in a big half-moon shape with inside made to fit the job they are to perform. Hospital, chapel, schools, living quarters and so forth. As I started to say about shows—this one here has just one projector. So at the end of the reel there’s a blackout while the projectionist changes reels. And it always happens at the critical instances in the movie. Then at the other theatre which just opened—there’s a show every night. It’s in a huge fan shaped area with a big closed in stage and screen. Has just hardwood barracks with no benches with no backs for seats. That’s all the officers have too, so we don’t holler.

  Very interesting, all this, huh, Mom? Say, if you should ever want to send anything this way—candy, cookies or anything at all put them in a good wood box or metal. Cardboard boxes aren’t worth sending—they are wrecks when they get here.

  Write. Love, Murray

  A month and a half into his time on Oahu my father decided to find out why he wasn’t getting his mail regularly. Everyone else seemed to. But Dad went days without a single letter and then got a bunch of them. So one day, he decided to hop in a jeep and go over to the post office. When an officer told him the address he had for my father, he was dumbfounded. The address was wrong.

  Then the officer took him to the address. Inside the communications building was an office. My father’s name was on the door. A desk was in there, with supplies and papers spread about as if he worked there every day. He didn’t know just why, but it sent shivers down his spine. No one could explain it and my father didn’t pursue it any further. As far as he knew, the office remained just as he’d seen it for the remainder of the war.

  But years later he would reflect, “It was eerie. I didn’t know what it meant. Maybe it was just a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  By Design

  Finished first day of school. It’s just a refresher course in everything we had before, mostly just to pass the time I’d guess.—January 22, 1945

  Dad and I had just finished editing for the day. I reached down, opened my backpack on the floor next to me, and slid my laptop into the padded compartment. Smaller compartments held other necessities: pens, pencils, and paper clips, as well as ibuprofen for the occasional headache. I took a yellow sticky note out and pressed it onto the plastic-encased letter we’d ended with and put the notebook into my backpack too. I stood up, stretching, and went to the kitchen.

  “Do you want a glass of water?” I asked.

  “No, thanks,” he answered.

  When I returned to the living room, Dad was rummaging through a plastic grocery bag. He pulled out a candy bar and then held the bag out to me.

  “Choose one,” he said. “They’re much better for you than water.”

  Inside the bag were four or five different kinds of candy bars, twenty or so in all.

  “Sale, huh?” I asked.

  “Three for a dollar,” he said. “Take several.”

  We sat back with our candy bars. He watched the muted television. I snuck glances at him.

  “Did you have any friends during the war?” I asked.

  As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. The words “friend” and “war” didn’t sound right in the same sentence. But it was too late.

  So I tried to explain. “Well, you know, is there anybody that you hung out with or became friends with on base?”

  Silence.

  When Mom stopped to chat on her way through the living room, it was an interruption we were both grateful for. We talked a little about her flower bulbs and the green beans cooking on the stove that smelled so good. But then a look came over her face and she said, “You two are busy. I’ll leave you alone.” And before I could say anything, she was gone, clinking around in the kitchen.

  I wanted to bow out gracefully—if that was possible. But a vest of weights held me down. I couldn’t just leave. Even though Mom had interrupted my question, I knew Dad wasn’t easily distracted. I’d finished my candy bar, so I didn’t even have that to focus my attention on. So I waited, trying to think of another subject to bring up.

  “I did have one friend,” he suddenly said. “I don’t remember much about him. But his name was Mal.”

  Then, to my surprise, my father started to talk freely. His tone was matter-of-fact, even happy, as he spoke of his friend. He began on the day they met.

  For those still on the base, there was a morning ritual. They went to an outdoor bulletin board to look for their name on the long list posted each day. Sailors on the list could expect to be in the next group to be shipped out into the battle. Every time my father checked the board, he saw different faces. But one day, he saw a young man who looked familiar.

  My father ran his finger down the list of names, and then leaned against the side of the bulletin board.

  “I can’t believe it,” Dad said.

  “You too?” the man asked.

  Dad glanced at him.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Everyone else follows the same pattern. It’s alphabetical. We’re drafted out alphab
etically, or we’re supposed to be anyway.”

  The man nodded.

  “I know,” he said. “Then when it gets to your name, it’s skipped. Am I right?”

  Dad nodded, adding, “I just don’t understand. I should have been drafted out several times by now.”

  “Well, hey, maybe they lost our records,” the man joked, “and we’ll just have to stay here in Hawaii for the remainder of the war.”

  “Wouldn’t that be great?” Dad said.

  They didn’t know it then, but their meeting and that short conversation was just the beginning.

  They went their separate ways assuming they’d never see each other again. The base was huge, and two servicemen could serve their entire tour of duty there and never see each other.

  “We might as well have lived in different cities,” my father recalled.

  A few days after their meeting, a jeep parked in front of Dad’s tent. The driver, an armed sailor, stood in the doorway to the tent.

  “Fisher, Murray?” he inquired.

  “That’s me,” my father answered.

  The sailor then asked for my father to recite his ID number, which he did.

  “You are to come with me,” the sailor said.

  My father sat in the passenger side as the driver zigzagged through the tent city, without speaking. My father’s questions were met with stony silence. When he got to the destination, one of the many buildings on the base, the sailor told him to go inside and await further instructions.

  Inside, another sailor was waiting for him. He led my father to a room. When he opened the door, there stood the young man from the bulletin board. A small group of men and an instructor had also assembled. They took their seats at a table, each as confused as the next. But then the officer in charge started to speak and things started to make sense.