My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  “Oh?” A sharp pang stabbed my heart. “Who is it?”

  “Melissa Cole. The sister of Philip, the first of my buddies who got hit—off the coast of Iceland. I wrote to his parents, and Melissa wrote back. Here…” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small photo. “What do you think of her?”

  “Nice,” I lied to the round-faced blonde and sat down slowly. The stars that flickered before my eyes, the mounting nausea… if I stood a second longer, I would have fallen onto Gary.

  Gary took the picture from my hand and looked at it dreamily. “I think she looks a little bit like Mum—around the eyes,” he said, which pushed me over the edge.

  “Well, I don’t think so at all,” I grumbled.

  “I’ll find out soon,” Gary announced as he put the photo back in his wallet. “When I leave here I’m going to Henley for three days to visit Melissa’s family.”

  My mouth hung open. He was cutting short his long-awaited visit with us to go stay with a family of total strangers? The afternoon was getting worse by the minute!

  “Do your parents know about this?” I asked, outraged.

  “Not yet. They know I’m leaving on Monday, but of course they think I’m going straight back to the ship. Keep it to yourself, will you? It’s bad enough if they find out on the weekend. Melissa is three years older than me,” Gary added, “and she’s not Jewish. Seems to run in the family. But of course she won’t have it nearly as hard as Mum.”

  “Wait a minute. You haven’t even met Melissa!” The name turned into a hiss in my mouth.

  But Gary just shrugged his shoulders. “People can get to know each other through letters too. Is there any other way during the war? Give me the tarp.”

  I threw the tarp into the hole. Gary unfolded it and began to stomp it into the ground.

  “You have no idea how much I’ve looked forward to seeing you again!” he said with a smile. “It’s hard to believe you just arrived last year! It seems like you’ve always been here with us, doesn’t it? And now,” he added, “you can take the other shovel and fill in with dirt from around the edges. I’ll stamp it down firm, we’ll let it dry, then seal the floor with hot tar and put the bunker back together. Then when the bombs fall, you’ll be all cozy and comfortable in here!”

  I cried for three nights. By the time it was Amanda’s turn to spill tears in secret—not because of Melissa Cole herself, but because of the three days with Gary we were cheated of—I was already feeling better, and even got a certain satisfaction from finally having someone to hate again. It was a good thing I didn’t know about voodoo, or I probably would have tried something really nasty! Instead I limited my efforts to secretly wishing that by the time Gary arrived, Melissa Cole would have an enormous pimple.

  Gary, who had no clue about the abyss his news had thrown me into, became visibly more relaxed. He slept a lot and ate his way through all of his favorite dishes, which Amanda prepared for him. She had stayed home from work to devote her full attention to him, but the day before he left he insisted on coming along to the Elysée to see how she managed everything.

  While the main film was running he said to me, “I couldn’t possibly leave tomorrow without showing you my favorite spot in the Elysée!”

  Curious, I followed him through the lobby into the back room of the theater. We slipped through a door with a sign that said “No Entrance” into a narrow, unlit hallway that led along the side walls of the theater. The voices and sounds of the film followed us; its flickering lights fell through the narrow openings between the walls and the ceiling and showed us the way.

  We turned a corner and found ourselves in the space directly behind the screen, which had a high ceiling but was only a few yards wide. It was used as storage space. I had only been here once, and the sounds of the weekly news reel had washed over me at such an intense volume that I could feel their echoes under my ribs hours later. Now Gary and I found ourselves eye to eye with the friendly face of James Stewart, who strolled through Washington to the gentle tones of a sweet, sad melody.

  Immediately, I felt like I had been enchanted. “But what if they see us from the other side?” I asked.

  Gary shook his head. “The light falls from the other side onto the screen and breaks there, so no one can see us. Here, take a seat.”

  Gary turned his chair and mine to face each other and sat down before me with a serious expression on his face. “I want to discuss a family matter with you, Frances,” he said.

  How strange and unfamiliar he looked. Half of his face was covered by shadows, while bright, flickering light shone on the other half. His one visible eye bored into me. I wasn’t listening to the voices coming from the speakers anymore.

  “I’ve been thinking for a long time about whether or not I should do this,” he continued. “I mean talking about the future, which no one can know, especially these days. But then I thought, to hell with it, if anyone understands, it’s Frances! My little sister with her two lives, with all the decisions and changes she’s already had to make without knowing why, she’ll understand.”

  “Of course,” I responded encouragingly to his smile, while at the same time asking myself how he could possibly think something so amazing about me.

  “I plan to come back from this war,” Gary said. “I want to go to college, have a career, be a good husband, and, well, give my mum a pack of grandchildren!” He laughed for a moment and then was serious again. “I fully intend to do all of that, and I believe in it. But what if that isn’t the way it goes? It would be foolish to not think about it, wouldn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer. There was no need. Suddenly I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “I have to ask you something before I leave tomorrow, Frances. I’ve always called you my sister, but will you still be that if I don’t come back? Will you be my parents’ daughter?”

  “Yes, I will,” I whispered.

  “Promise me you’ll take my place, comfort them, make them happy, and be there for them when they get old someday?”

  “I could never take your place, but everything else I promise, yes!”

  “And your own mother?”

  I had to smile. “Mamu will need a new family when she comes too.”

  Gary turned away and looked at the screen. Light and shadow played on his face and I couldn’t see whether he was happy or sad. “I can hardly wait to meet her,” he finally said as his face broke out into a wide grin. “And the first thing I’ll tell her is that one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life was to knock her daughter out cold with a car door!”

  “Wait a minute! I picked you out, not the other way around!”

  “Really? I remember that differently. You just wanted to get out of Satterthwaite Hall, with a huge goose egg on your head and two or three words of English. And the first thing you did was attack my mum! Hey! Stop kicking me!”

  The giggling and commotion that suddenly broke out behind the screen couldn’t be missed! Confused faces turned toward the projector room—and found it unoccupied, because Amanda was already racing through the side passageway like a torpedo.

  “Are you two out of your minds?” she hissed, grabbing our wrists and shaking us a little on the way out. “What on earth has gotten into you?”

  But neither Gary nor I would have known how to explain it to her.

  Chapter 17

  Happy Returns

  Hitler’s ultimatum to Churchill, his “Last Appeal to Reason,” came and went. German troops occupied the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney in the English Channel. Air-raid alarms became more frequent, and the wail of the sirens every evening cut the films short at the Elysée. The audience calmly filed out, Amanda locked up, and we drove home. Those who hadn’t been able to see a movie through to the end could come back the next evening for free.

  We were encouraged to collect aluminum for the production of Spitfires, the agile little planes that did much of the defensive fighting against the German invasion.
Once again I was knocking on strangers’ doors, but this time it was to ask the woman of the house to part with every pot and pan she could possibly spare. “Two thousand cooking pots make an airplane!” went the slogan.

  Uncle Matthew started wearing the khaki uniform of the Home Guard. The members of the civil defense—men who were too old for active military duty, but also seventeen-year-olds—kept watch over the skies day and night to identify any enemy parachutes. They used search spotlights and antiaircraft guns, built tank blockades, and held their own drills.

  “Ah, good timing,” Amanda commented when the air-raid sirens started to howl just as she locked the door to the theater behind her. “Tonight there are movie buffs flying!”

  I hooked my arm through hers and we walked toward the Underground, happy that the alarm hadn’t sounded fifteen minutes earlier, interrupting the showing. There were still plenty of people out on the street on that warm, humid summer night, coming out of theaters and restaurants and, like us, hardly bothered by the alarm signal. The German planes in the sky that August didn’t have their sights set on London. They bombed—despite fierce resistance—the Royal Air Force bases. But the capital city felt secure. Searchlights routinely crisscrossed the sky like bright swords and illuminated our path, which was easy enough to find even though the streets were dark.

  Out of nowhere came the rumble of thunder, followed by crackling and bursts of sound that terrified even the Londoners, who were well acquainted with summer thunderstorms. All of a sudden everyone began to run. Laughing, I stood still and looked upward, anticipating the first heavy drops of rain. Even when Amanda grabbed my hand and pulled me along with an exasperated, “Frances, run!” I still didn’t understand.

  The bombs fell without a sound. There was just the muted rumbling of distant destruction, the cracking and quaking of hits right near us—and the fearful cries of fleeing people. I held tight to Amanda’s hand, entirely focused on not letting go of her as we were pulled along with the pack. A penetrating stench fell over us and left a disgusting taste of fire and gunpowder in our mouths.

  We were almost at the entrance to the Underground. Air-raid wardens waved us down the stairs, sorting the incoming stream of people between the tunnel and shafts. It was eerily quiet down there; we heard the scraping and scratching of exhausted feet, and here and there someone cried quietly. Hazy outlines of people moved between us and the dim lighting in search of a free spot.

  I slid down with my back against the wall next to Amanda. Breathing hard, she leaned against the masonry; she must have lost her hat along the way. I nudged her in the side, filled with an unfamiliar feeling of triumph. We made it! We hadn’t let go of each other! We had arrived together! Looking back, it seemed like I hadn’t been afraid for a single moment.

  A woman staggered past us and cried in a plaintive voice, “John! John! Are you there?”

  Her calls faded as she walked farther into the tunnel. “Are you okay?” I asked Amanda, becoming a little concerned.

  “Couldn’t be better,” she said grimly. I put both my arms around her and felt how she trembled. I held her just a little tighter to let some of my newly discovered courage flow into her. The shaft filled with still more people, more quiet calls. Gladys. Emma. Trevor. And the woman still called for John.

  “God help us. Now it’s begun,” whispered Amanda.

  But the all-clear signal came quickly. We only crouched on the cold, dusty floor for about an hour and a half, Amanda leaning against the hard wall with me in her arms. The entire time I listened intently for sounds above us and tried to imagine what might be happening, but aside from the distant rise and fall of the sirens, no other sound made its way through to us. Motionless gray figures waited in a long row that stretched into the darkness; with the all-clear signal signs of life returned to the tunnel. The gray figures rose and took on human form again; trains that had been stopped continued on their way. Most of the people who had sought refuge left the station, while others joined tightly packed lines waiting to ride the train home. I would have liked to see what was going on above us, whether there were fires or even bodies being pulled from rubble. I didn’t understand how Amanda could go home without taking at least a quick peek at the damage and knowing what was going on! But she insisted we take the first subway we could, no matter how loudly I protested.

  Feeling slighted, I sat across from her with my arms folded and pouted at my reflection in the car window. “I most certainly will not let you go see dead and injured people!” she suddenly snapped at me, as if I had said something.

  “All right,” I replied angrily. “I didn’t know you had such a weak stomach!”

  We both stared out the window. It seemed we would never reach our station. Finally the subway rolled out of the tunnel onto the tracks above ground, and I pressed my face against the glass, aghast.

  There was only one fire: a thin, black trail of smoke, a shattered roof outlined against flickering orange light. The house stood right alongside the tracks, and as we approached I watched pointed tongues of flame leaping out of the upper story. Behind broken windowpanes, a glowing chandelier swayed gently.

  “Those poor people,” Amanda murmured. “Hopefully they were able to get out.”

  Distraught, I walked behind her as we left the station. A fire engine raced past us wailing shrilly. A bit farther, huge clumps of earth lay in the middle of the street, surrounded by agitated people whose yards had been bombed. “If we had been in our shelter, we’d be buried!” exclaimed one woman.

  How I would have loved to take Amanda’s hand as we walked! I knew that all I had to do was make a small apology, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Amanda also kept quiet, probably because she wasn’t one to say “I told you so.” We went home in silence.

  The newscaster on the radio reported that several planes had dropped bombs over London—probably a mistake after part of a squadron apparently lost its way to the RAF airfields. There had been deaths and injuries, especially among people who were just leaving movies and theaters, and in several places gawkers were interfering with rescue efforts.

  Now I was even more ashamed, especially since Amanda had also come into the living room and must have heard every word. But she sat down at her secretary to read a letter from Gary. The first one since his furlough, it had to include an extensive report about Melissa Cole, whom I definitely wasn’t over yet. Amanda’s smile widened as she read; it seemed to me like a betrayal.

  “And?” I asked meanly after a while. “Is she going to have a baby already?”

  “Most certainly not! That’s enough, Frances!” she said, truly enraged.

  Fifty-seven nights. When did we stop counting? The sirens kept wailing inside us, even when the nearly constant droning of the planes was absent for a few hours. When the bombers returned, the unused cot above me in our shelter began to rattle quietly; Gary probably hadn’t tightened the screws quite enough. But as long as the cot didn’t rattle, I knew we were safe.

  The gas lights flickered and played with the shadows of our coats, which we hung from hooks in the ceiling in the narrow space between the cots. Amanda, across the aisle from me, turned page after page, reading her way through the blitz. When it got especially bad, when there was howling and crackling and powerful blasts rocked us, she read to me: psalms, detective stories, women’s magazines, the newspaper, anything at all. We were alone. Uncle Matthew was constantly on duty and only came home for a few hours during the day to sleep.

  Even my thoughts were the same every night: At least Mamu won’t be hit by a bomb, since the Netherlands surrendered. But how is Bekka doing… ?

  Because at the same time the Germans were bombing London, British bombers flew toward Berlin. Did Bekka hear the same things at night and see the same things during the day that I did? Planes that looked like a swarm of locusts as they approached, a few in front as the vanguard and then, in their wake, hundreds of bombers and fighter planes. You could spot the tiny bl
ack puffs underneath the planes just before the bombs dropped. When they hit, their shrapnel rained down on the street like hail, or shattering glass.

  Amanda didn’t know about my new theory. She only knew that I followed her everywhere, which was actually a little embarrassing. But what if a bomb fell on our house and only hit one of us?

  My theory developed during the long nights of bombing. The Jews believe that people who are dead lie in their graves and wait there for that one day when everyone rises from the dead, but I saw it differently. I was convinced that we go to heaven as soon as we die, and our family is waiting for us! But what about people who don’t belong to our biological family? If Amanda and I were struck down at the same time, we would have time on our way to heaven to make a plan. If not, I would probably never find her again. Heaven is big, and the British probably occupy an entirely different part than the Mangolds from Germany.

  When the Germans began only attacking at night because they lost fewer planes to us, Amanda forced me to go back to school. All the begging, crying, and angry pleading in the world had no effect. Every morning I set out after a futile argument, the gas mask dangling from my neck and with so much rage in my heart that Uncle Matthew swore he could see a black cloud above my head. I often met him on the way to school, as he was coming home from his night shift. He slept during the day, and Amanda did the shopping, cooked, and cleaned since the Elysée had been closed since the middle of September. Most of the time Uncle Matthew reported back for duty in the early afternoon.

  When he was around me, he never talked about what exactly he experienced. I only knew that he operated spotlights and antiaircraft guns, and sometimes helped dig out people who were buried in rubble. Thick dirt often clung to his skin when he came home, and his hair was full of dust and ashes.