Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

by Faith Sullivan

  “So you don’t think prayers get answered?”

  They began walking back to the ambulance. “I figure things fall out the way they’re gonna fall out. If they fall out for the good, folks think their prayers got answered. If things fall out for the bad, they say, ‘God’s will be done.’ Guys say there ain’t atheists in the trenches. I’m proof otherwise.”

  Silly climbed in behind the wheel. “I’ll never try to convert anyone to my way. People have to believe what they have to believe. You go on being a Catholic. It’s all the same to me. Whatever you are, you’re all right.”

  Hilly cranked the engine, tossed the crank into the ambulance, and slid in.

  He thought long about the things Silly had said. Instead of being upset, he felt honored that he’d been trusted. It was a big thing, being trusted. He would never let his friend down.

  Hilly had never imagined France so desolate. Further back from the lines, it wasn’t. But here, near the front, any remaining trees had been ripped apart, splinters of them standing out against the sky, looking like shattered soldiers. Besides these, there was nothing to see but an occasional farmhouse, often shelled to kindling.

  Volunteer drivers from America and Britain joined the ranks of the regulars, but many of them left after one too many grisly scenes. The ambulance driver’s job was to fetch fallen men from aid stations in the trenches, where wounds were patched and limbs amputated—the sooner the amputation, the less likely gangrene—and to remove them to hospitals.

  When the enemy line advanced, the aid stations themselves were under fire. Hilly and Silly’s first ambulance was destroyed by an enemy shell, probably an accidental hit. Mistakes were the daily business of war. Mistakes in requisitioning, mistakes in the trenches and in no-man’s-land, mistakes in aid stations and field hospitals. How did anybody ever win a war? Hilly suspected that they just wore each other down to dust and ran out of shells.

  Hilly and Silly hadn’t been in that first ambulance when it was struck, but they’d had a hell of a time getting the man they’d come for back to the field hospital, carrying him all the way on a litter. He died in surgery. Hilly blamed himself, but Silly kept telling him that he was just the litter-bearer of bad news, not the cause.

  Another of their ambulances was horse drawn. That was tricky. Even horses accustomed to battle will shy and bolt under particularly bad conditions.

  But the worst of all worsts was coming across parts of men. Though their orders were to see to the living, you couldn’t leave parts for animals to find—or at least Hilly and Sylvester couldn’t. The first time they’d gathered parts, they’d been so close to the lines that dirt from the shelling was flying in their faces. The enemy had taken a forward trench, sending the Allies, under machine-gun and rifle fire, scurrying like rats into a fallback trench.

  As Hilly and his partner scuttled toward the trench, a soldier erupted from another, screaming, “Aw, Jesus. Aw, Jesus.” One moment he was running, and the next he was flying apart like a piece of cheap machinery. A flywheel here, a rod there—and blood everywhere.

  Silly ran back to the ambulance for the rubber bag, and the two gathered up what they could find, including a blood-smeared letter, which might help someone identify the poor devil.

  That night, by the illumination of an acetylene lamp in a field hospital, Hilly wrote,

  Dear Mama,

  We’ve had a busy day, though it’s pretty much the same every day. Coming and going. We’re fast. Silly and I make more runs than anybody, if I do say so myself.

  The weather’s raw, so thank Mrs. Barnstable for the gloves and scarves and socks, please. Bad frostbite can take a man out of commission. Oh, and please thank the Women’s Committee for the blanket.

  I had a nice letter from John a while back. The fellows razzed me because it came from Washington, with the seal of the House of Representatives on it. “How come you’re over here?” they asked. “You could be sitting behind a desk, cabbagehead.” They like me, though. Also had a letter from Mrs. Lundeen and another from Diana Hapgood. Sorry to hear that Grandpa is down with the grippe.

  I miss you, Mama. Take care of yourself. I’ll be home soon.

  I will always be

  Your loving son,

  Hilly

  Nell kept Hilly’s letters beside the bed in a box from Lundeen’s with an English garden on the lid. Each night, she took them out and read them through. Along with Mr. Wodehouse, they helped her fall asleep.

  This evening, returning the letter box to the table, she blew her nose and plucked up Mr. Wodehouse’s The Man With Two Left Feet, turning the pages to a favorite short story titled “The Mixer.”

  “I don’t know what I am,” the dog observed. “I have a bulldog kind of face, but the rest of me is terrier. I have a long tail which sticks straight up in the air. My hair is wiry. My eyes are brown. I am jet black, with a white chest. I once overheard Fred saying that I was a Gorgonzola cheese-hound, and I have generally found Fred reliable in his statements.”

  She wished she had let Hilly have a dog.

  God love you, my darling Mr. Wodehouse. But when she whispered, “Good night, Mr. Wodehouse,” put him aside, and turned out the lamp, she found herself in the dreaded no-man’s-land between awake and asleep. There big guns pounded—these guns, she knew, were only her blood throbbing through an artery and, as the weeks passed, strange to say, their drumming brought Hilly closer.

  Nell couldn’t blame people for staying away from Grandpa Hapgood’s wake. Everyone was frightened of influenza. Grandpa’s was already the fifth death in town, and Dr. Gray expected more.

  Diana Hapgood stood near the casket, the man at her side much younger than Grandpa but bearing an uncanny resemblance to him. “This is my great-uncle Chester,” Diana told Nell. “Grandpa’s youngest brother.” Chester, at Diana’s invitation, was leaving Waterloo, Iowa, to move in with his great-niece. “The house is too big without Grandpa,” Diana said.

  “I’ve put off writing to Hilly about your grandfather,” Nell said.

  “Let me,” Diana replied. “I was the one who told him that Grandpa was down in bed.”

  “I hope your grandfather knew that Hilly took the harmonica to France.”

  Diana nodded and took Nell’s hand. “Hilly wrote how he played for the men. He said the late-night hours were the hardest for the badly wounded, but sometimes the music helped—especially if a man was close to the end. He said there was often a hymn or a sweetheart song a boy wanted to hear.”

  Hilly didn’t tell Nell about his foot. His and Silly’s ambulance had broken down a few miles from the field hospital. The two men tried without success to restart it, so when darkness closed in, they climbed into the back, swaddling in rough, government-issue blankets and the blanket from the Women’s Committee. Inside his boots, Hilly’s feet were wet from the snow he and Silly had stood in trying to seduce the engine. He’d worn extra socks, but they didn’t help. Two toes on his right foot were frozen.

  By the time another ambulance could fetch the men, the toes needed to be amputated. Hilly was temporarily out of commission, and when he returned to his ambulance he hobbled with pain and the loss of the toes.

  Again, the other drivers called him cabbagehead, insisting that the pain and the crippling should send him back to a rear hospital, if not home altogether. But the Brits were tough on their own wounded, sending the patched-up back into action as soon as possible, even if they’d been to England for hospitalization. Hilly wanted no dispensation for being a Yank—and, besides, he wouldn’t abandon Silly.

  Over the weeks that followed, the two men had glazed over. He and Silly hurtled back and forth over impossible roads and cattle paths, never thinking a sentient thought, operating on a kind of wind-up response. Hilly had no time for his feet. The swelling and cracking open—the bleeding, burning, throbbing, and constant peeling—were conditions he mostly noted from a distant corner of his mind. When, rarely, he did pay them closer attention, he realized that his feet
ached up to his hip bones, and sometimes they ached all the way to his armpits.

  Run as he once had? Forget it.

  chapter thirty-seven

  IN FEBRUARY, Nell received a letter. The handwriting was both familiar and not.

  Dear Nell,

  Heaven forgive me, fourteen years have passed since I left Harvester. I expect you gave up wondering about me long ago. I’m sorry I haven’t written. At first I didn’t want to cause you more worry. And later—well, I just don’t know why.

  You probably guessed that I was in a family way. I won’t say more about that. The first years in California were hard. I put my hand to any work to support my baby, Mary Cora. I was working in a hotel in San Francisco when the earthquake struck.

  I was so frightened! I thought I had lost my baby. A woman in our boardinghouse was taking care of her. When I went looking for them, they were gone—and so was the boardinghouse.

  Eventually I found them in a tent in the Presidio. The money I had was lost, of course. I headed south then, carrying Mary Cora and begging as we went. I found out there isn’t anything you won’t do when it’s your baby.

  I don’t know how we ended up outside of Oxnard, hundreds of miles from San Francisco. But I was there, sitting beside the road holding Mary Cora, when the smartest little buggy pulled up with a young woman driver.

  I guess she could see that we were half dead, because she took us home—I mean to her mother and father’s house. She was visiting from Los Angeles, where she was in college.

  I loved the house from the start and I knew I wanted to live there. It was perfect in every way, as pretty as a picture. And I took to the mother right off too. Her name was Mrs. Edwin Kerchel but she asked me to call her Belva. Isn’t that a beautiful name?

  Life is so strange. Belva was in a wheelchair, like our dear Cora. The daughter, Camille, told me that her mother had been hurt in a buggy accident. Camille was home from college because the lady who’d been looking after Belva and keeping house had dropped dead of a heart attack right at the kitchen sink scraping carrots.

  After the baby and I had a bath and I put on some old clothes of Camille’s, I told them how we’d left San Francisco after the earthquake. God forgive me, I also told them a big lie: I said my husband had been killed in the quake and that I was desperate to find work. I don’t know if they believed me.

  When Dr. Kerchel came home for lunch, Belva and Camille and I had already discussed my staying on and I had put a meal on the table for everyone. I could see how relieved the doctor was. We were solving his problems.

  Belva was forty then, and she had money of her own. Aren’t those the prettiest words you ever heard?—“money of her own.” It had come from grandparents in New England.

  I’ve been with the Kerchels for twelve years now. Mary Cora is thirteen, and the family has all but adopted her. She is a pretty child, nearly taller than me already, with dark hair and eyes. She is also the sweetest girl who ever lived. She has her father’s disposition—but I said I wouldn’t write about all that. I’ll just say that Mary Cora’s father was a good man and that I loved him.

  So, dear Nell, I’ve brought you up to date. In case you are wondering, Camille still lives in Los Angeles and is now married to a successful land speculator. Mary Cora and I are well and happy. Happier than I deserve to be but I won’t look that gift horse in the mouth.

  Though you may want to put “Paid” to your memories of me, I pray that you will write and tell me about yourself and my darling Hilly. Is he going to college? I have told Mary Cora that we have kin in Minnesota, but she thinks that I met her father in San Francisco. There is no lie I wouldn’t tell to spare her shame. Will God forgive me all of this, Nell? I need to hear your thoughts.

  I will save further details of our lives for later—if I hear back from you.

  Love to you and Hilly,

  Elvira

  P. S. I am enclosing a photograph of Mary Cora and me, taken by Belva. We are standing beside a fishpond in the backyard. Mary Cora is wearing the peach lawn dress you made me for George and Cora’s wedding! Remember, I told you I’d keep it forever.

  Here, in the midst of constant concern over Hilly and the periodic arrival of the poison-pen notes, here was joy. Elvira was not only alive, she was well, the mother of a fine thirteen-year-old child, and, to top it off, splendidly situated with a kind family.

  The earthquake and the ensuing poverty and dislocation must have been harrowing beyond Nell’s comprehension. So much destruction, so many deaths. But that was all behind mother and child, part of history. Elvira and Mary Cora had been a part of history—The Great San Francisco Earthquake.

  Nell must answer Elvira’s letter at once, assuring her that she and Hilly were still very much a part of the young woman’s family. Wouldn’t it be grand if Elvira and Mary Cora returned for a visit? Like Hilly’s safe return, that was something to contemplate with great relish.

  Dear Elvira,

  It is a joy to hear from you! The lost is restored. I have thought of you every week and wondered how it was going with you.

  Thank you for the photo. What a lovely girl Mary Cora is. And you look as young as when you left us. I can see that the Kerchels take as good care of you as you do of them.

  God forgave you long ago. He sees into your heart. He is a loving and tender God, despite what we are sometimes told from the pulpit.

  You asked about Hilly and college. I wish I could report that he was at the University. But he volunteered for the Army Ambulance Corps and is seeing terrible fighting in France. Remember him in your prayers.

  I am well and continue to teach third grade. I see the Lundeens regularly. I am sad to tell you that George and Cora went down with the Lusitania. It took Laurence a long time to recover, but in recent months he is looking stronger and more like his old self.

  Young Larry is a great blessing to his grandparents. Juliet insisted that they move back to the old house since that was Larry’s home and where he wanted to be. Despite the differences in their ages, Larry and Hilly are great friends.

  Dear Grandpa Hapgood was recently taken by influenza. He taught Hilly to play the harmonica that you sent him. And Hilly has taken the instrument along to France, so your gift has seen a good deal of the world and brought entertainment and perhaps a bit of comfort to young men you and I will never meet. I know you’ll take pleasure from hearing that.

  I am still above Rabel’s Meat Market. Thanks to old Gus, I have electricity now and soon will have running water! But I do not have a telephone—I am old fashioned. Maybe someday.

  The Rabel boy has come into the business with Gus. I’m afraid he bullies his father. The boy wanted to raise my rent, but his father put his foot down. Apollo Shane, our lawyer here, drew up a paper saying that my rent would remain the same as long as I choose to live in the apartment. You can imagine that did not go down well with the son.

  Well, darling Elvira-restored-to-me, I want to see this onto the westbound train today, so will close in haste, sending my own trainload of love to you and Mary Cora.

  Nell

  chapter thirty-eight

  WITH CHARACTERISTIC DIFFIDENCE, Aunt Martha’s husband, Bernard, passed away in his sleep. The funeral was simple and sparsely attended, but the coffin was grossly splendid. In the vestibule, Anna Braun commented, “Poor old devil finally got some respect.”

  During the reception in the church basement, Aunt Martha held court. A few cronies in ancient black dresses who’d come primarily for the ham, escalloped potatoes, and peas, paid their respects, tut-tutting and pursing their lips sympathetically to earn their lunch.

  To Nell, Aunt Martha confided that she was selling the farm. “Top prices now. Ed Barnstable says it won’t be on the market a week.”

  And Uncle Bernard in his grave a whole half hour.

  “Where will you live?” Nell asked.

  “In town of course. Someplace north of the park.”

  Nell unclenched her jaw, drained her
coffee, and said good-bye.

  That afternoon, a letter from Hilly was waiting at the post office. Setting the kettle to heat for tea, Nell changed into a muslin housedress, poured the near-bubbling water into the pot (Mam: “Don’t let it bile on and on, darlin’. Somethin’ blessed biles away.”), sat down in the green chair, and with care slid open the letter.

  Closing her eyes and holding the unread pages in her lap, she waited for the tea to steep. She liked to create a bit of ceremony around Hilly’s letters, give them the time and due they deserved. Rising after some moments to pour the tea through the proper strainer and into the delicate Haviland cup she’d found at Bender’s Second Hand, she returned to her chair and to the letter.

  Dear Mama,

  You’ll be happy to hear that my foot is better. I’m generally better all around. We’re finally hearing good news. Fellows are saying the war will soon be over. I’m not saying that the Germans will surrender tomorrow but only that things are changing.

  Silly and I are back from a few days’ leave. We found space on a train to Amiens. Mama, we had real baths with hot water, real beds with clean sheets, and real meals with red wine!

  We drank a whole bottle one night. And so did a fellow named Rudy, from St. Bridget (Can you believe it?). Rudy and I are going to get together in Minnesota once this is over.

  Don’t worry—I haven’t become a boozer. It’s just that when you get away from the front, you try to erase it from your mind.

  I will always be

  Your loving son,

  Hilly

  P. S. Silly and I are going to be decorated by the French and English governments. It’s crazy! But maybe it’s some kind of mistake, so don’t get excited yet. . . .

  Nell prayed that the end of the war was indeed near. In Washington, John was optimistic, but she would not let herself hope until Hilly was home in one piece. What had he meant when he said that his foot was better?