My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  There were quiet steps on the stairs and Mrs. Beaver appeared in the bedroom doorway. “I saw the messenger,” she whispered bravely. “Can I help?”

  “Could you call Matthew? The number’s next to the phone.”

  She nodded and disappeared. I slipped under the blanket at Amanda’s back, put an arm around her and my chin on her shoulder, as she had so often done with me. I was always sure she would be there for me. But now, as I wrapped my arms around her stiff body, I wasn’t sure anymore. No matter how strongly my love for this, my second mother, might burn… it might not be enough. It hadn’t been enough for Mamu either.

  When Matthew came home, silent, pale, and resolute, and closed the bedroom door firmly behind the two of them, and I had gone down the stairs with stiff, unsteady steps, my concern for Amanda slowly made way for other thoughts. The telegram still lay on the steps. No one had touched it, and I sat on the same step where Amanda had sat earlier.

  “We regret to inform you…”

  No! Desperation, rage, and denial broke over me simultaneously, a hot wave of distress, dizziness, and tears. It wasn’t possible. Not him, not my brother, my wonderful, laughing brother, who was the first of the Shepards to love me, gave me my name, and made up “Dictionaryish,” our shared language. Not him. Things like that didn’t happen! I summoned all my strength and looked at the telegram again.

  “. . . that Midshipman Gary Shepard has been reported as missing since the demise of the HMS Princess of Malta on the 7th of August 1942 off the Portuguese Azores…”

  Only missing! The Azores! I could see the world map in Mrs. Collins’s classroom before me. A whole group of islands lay between southern Europe and the USA—he must have managed to swim to one of the beaches! If not, then he paddled a rescue boat, or floated on a plank.

  I jumped up and ran to the phone. “Operator? The Royal Navy please.”

  “And who exactly would you like to speak to?” The young lady rattled off a list of possible departments.

  “The one that’s responsible for rescues at sea,” I said. There was a short pause on the other end of the line. “It’s about my brother. His ship sank the day before yesterday and he’s probably stuck on the Azores, near Portugal.”

  I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. Hazel stood in the open front door. “Oh, dear,” muttered the young woman, flustered. “Then I’d better connect you with… let me see… can you wait a moment?” she asked helpessly.

  I didn’t wait. “They’ve probably already sent boats out,” I said. “If everyone called, they’d hardly have time to go out and rescue people.” Very slowly I put the receiver down.

  “What happened?” Hazel asked with wide eyes.

  “I don’t know.” I looked at the telegram again and forced myself to read it through to the end. “Here it just says that the ship went down and Gary hasn’t been found.”

  “Oh, Frances, how terrible!” Hazel spontaneously rushed over to me, and I took a step backward. “They just haven’t found him yet,” I repeated.

  “But that’s still awful,” Hazel replied, putting her thin arms around my neck and giving me a kiss—and then I couldn’t help it, I cried bitterly, even though I knew this couldn’t really be true.

  In the next few hours a parade of neighbors streamed through the Shephards’ kitchen, all of them bearing pots of soup. Hazel bravely stood by me, after a short whispered phone call with her mother. Sitting at the kitchen table, I was amazed how the soup multiplied. I felt myself overcome by a kind of fog the longer I sat there, and our house was already being subjected to that mysterious transformation that befalls any place where something terrible has happened: No one spoke in normal tones.

  The sun already lay deep on the horizon outside the kitchen window when Matthew emerged from the bedroom. His eyes were red from crying, and I would have liked to jump up and throw myself in his arms, but my legs felt like they didn’t belong to me. Slowly and heavily he sat down opposite me, nodded a few times, and said, as if to himself, “That was our Gary.”

  Hazel silently leaned against me. Matthew looked up and seemed to notice for the first time that we were there. “Can Frances spend a few days with you, Hazel?” he asked.

  “My mother already suggested it,” she replied, taking my right hand in hers.

  I immediately wanted to protest. But before I had a chance, we heard steps coming down the stairs and Amanda came into the kitchen.

  “What is all that?” she asked sternly, pointing to the pots.

  “The neighbors brought them,” I said, fearfully searching her face for some small sign of connection, but there was nothing, only a controlled, concentrated expression and tired, dry eyes that glanced at me briefly without any sign of emotion. “Well, of course you can eat what you want, Frances, but Matthew and I won’t eat anything until the seudat havra’ah. I hope you know which pot belongs to whom?”

  “No,” I admitted fearfully, and flinched as she started to lift the lids with impatient, almost accusatory clattering. She grimaced critically and carried one of the pots to the sink to empty it with the words, “This is certainly not kosher!”

  “I’ll just pack a few things,” I said quietly to Hazel.

  The Vathareerpurs must have been counting on my presence that evening. Hazel’s sister Jasmine had already moved out of the girls’ room to make room for me. And they had also adopted a strategy for dealing with me: Act as if nothing had happened. Hazel’s parents hugged me with tears in their eyes, and the next minute everything was perfectly normal. We sat at the dinner table; Hazel’s four younger siblings argued and passed around bowls with rice, fish, and samosas. I struggled with Mrs. Vathareerpur’s style of seasoning, which she could only have learned from fire-eaters. For a few hours I actually managed to convince myself that I was living a normal life.

  But I grew restless. In the middle of the night Hazel peered down from the upper bunk bed and said, “You’re shaking the whole bed with your tossing and turning.”

  “It’s not right. What am I doing here? I should be at home. What if they sent me away because I’m not part of the family?”

  The bed shook as Hazel climbed down and slipped under the covers with me. “I made a promise to Gary, but I think we made a mistake,” I whispered. “I’m not their daughter. How can I comfort them?”

  “Frances, right now you couldn’t comfort them if you were five daughters! And you’ll see them again tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, at the shiva, with all the other guests!”

  “What exactly happens there?” Hazel asked, probably to distract me.

  But I just shrugged my shoulders, not only because I had never sat shiva, but because I couldn’t think about anything but the fact that I had been sent away. Amanda and Matthew wanted to be alone. I wasn’t any comfort. Whatever we had been through together before this… in this sorrow that transcended all understanding, I had no place.

  They sent Mrs. Bloom. Our rabbi’s wife herself, wearing dark clothes and a serious expression, stood next to the delicate Mrs. Vathareerpur in her light blue sari and said, “Your parents asked me to pick you up and prepare you a little.”

  Timidly I stumbled along next to her, the handle of my suitcase burning in my hand. Fragments of Mrs. Bloom’s instructions echoed in my ears: ”. . . accept his fate… no noise, not the slightest protest should disturb the dead… the first meal, eggs and bread… for seven days, the mourners don’t leave their home…”

  Did everything she explained apply to me too? Surely not; how could I be one of the mourners when Gary wasn’t really my brother? But I wasn’t one of the visitors either, because I lived there! And knowing what awaited me at the house by no means meant that I was prepared for it. Mrs. Bloom had told me that “the mourners” didn’t wear shoes and sat directly on the floor or on low stools, while “the visitors” sat at the table, but it hadn’t sunk in at all that I would find Amanda and Matthew on the floor. Mrs. Bloom had to shove me toward the living room; she deposited
me there and took the suitcase from my hand. I was petrified.

  One of the women from the chevra kaddisha came to me. I knew her; she had sewn the burial clothes for Professor Schueler with us. She reached for my collar and took a small pair of scissors and made a tiny cut. In the next moment, the woman was pushed aside. I looked up and looked straight into Amanda’s face.

  How small she was! I was almost as tall as her, but hadn’t really noticed. Her eyes had a vacant, withdrawn expression. Very calmly and without any sign of recognition, she took the cut material in both hands and in one quick motion tore it—only a quiet sound, but it seemed to be magnified a hundred times for her, because in that moment I saw a wave of surprise and pain wash over her face.

  For me, though, that was the moment when I knew where I belonged. The torn clothes were the sign of the mourners, and it was Amanda, Gary’s mother, who brought me into that circle. There was no greater love she could have shown me.

  She led me back to her, our, place. Matthew, who was fighting tears, put an arm around me and held me close during the long hours when ever more visitors arrived. Some of them pressed my hand too. No one but me seemed to think that I wasn’t Gary’s flesh-and-blood sister.

  I had crossed the threshold. My arms and legs became heavy and tired and a wholly unexpected, deep peace spread through me. It wasn’t like anything I’d experienced before, except maybe the encounter with my father on the beach—a peace that didn’t come from within me, but from another place. And without any fear, I realized what Gary must have felt in his last conscious moments, and that he had really left us. I wouldn’t talk with him, laugh with him, share secrets, secretly idolize him. I would never see him again. I couldn’t imagine how that was possible, but I knew now that it was true.

  And yet I couldn’t have felt any closer to him. In these hours and days he was honored; the condolences and sadness of everyone who came to the Shepards’ was genuine, and I wished Gary could have seen it. He was one of them, a “real” Jew, who was loved and respected, and who would be missed. I felt that gratification for him.

  London, 14 August 1942

  Dear Walter,

  You’ll probably get this letter at the same time as the one I wrote two days ago explaining everything, but I’m sending it anyway, just because I wish you were here now.

  If only we could do something to help! Matthew can’t stop crying after the visitors leave at night, and I’m really worried about Amanda. Nothing seems to reach her. Is she still there at all? We talk about the people who were here during the day, about letters that come.

  But we don’t talk about Gary. Matthew says she’s bottled up her anger and she can’t even pray right now. “Don’t worry,” he says, “she’ll come back.” But he’s not a hundred percent sure either, because yesterday he let slip that if she hadn’t married a Jew, she’d have had half a dozen children and not lost her entire future in one blow.

  Last night I dreamed that the nursing home had been hit by a bomb and collapsed with Amanda inside and only I knew where to dig for her. The rescue crew carried Amanda past me on a stretcher and when she saw me, she said, “Frances, you saved my life, now it belongs to you!”—“But only in exchange!” I answered. “You saved my life too, have you forgotten?”—“I could never take what belongs to someone else,” she said, and I, who sadly only come up with answers like this in dreams, replied: “In that case, I would never offer it to you.”

  I wish I could make Amanda’s life worth something to her again. I miss her so much. I miss her even more than Gary. I want our old life back! How could God let this happen?

  I’m sorry for writing you such a letter, but besides us, there’s no one left who’s so close to the Shepards.

  Your Ziska

  After the shiva, I woke up to screams in the middle of the night. Amanda’s voice, distorted and distant, came from my foster parents’ bedroom, but not really. I hesitated for a moment, then peeked in. Matthew stood at the window in his pajamas; the whole scene must have seemed like a bad dream to him.

  Amanda was outside in the garden and she was on a rampage. In the streaming rain she hacked at her vegetable bed, so wild and beside herself that the spade kept slipping from her hand. She trampled and tore down the chicken fence. Her soaking wet nightgown hung around her legs, and her voice broke.

  “. . . and don’t you think that I’m sorry! You can punish me as much as you want, but I don’t regret anything! Not one second of love and caring will be destroyed by anything you can do to me!”

  “Amanda… don’t do this,” Matthew murmured to himself.

  I ran down the stairs, out into the cold rain that beat down on me. “Laws! Twenty-five years we obeyed, one single time we didn’t!” Amanda fell forward onto her knees and ripped the posts of the chicken fence from the earth. “Once, dammit! And I did it, not him! But it was good, and you know what? I’m glad I did it! Nothing you do… Go away, Frances! Nothing you do can change that. I don’t regret it!”

  Matthew stumbled out the kitchen door in a coat and boots, put up an umbrella, and waded helplessly through the muck to hold it above his completely drenched wife. “Get away, Matthew,” she said, and plunged the spade deep into the ground.

  And then, all of a sudden, it was over and Amanda started to cry loudly. “Oh, God, it’s true, it’s really true!” she moaned. Matthew put an arm around her and led her into the house.

  I stayed and looked around. The garden, the fence, the vegetables… completely destroyed. The light from the kitchen fell on a mud-covered battlefield, while the rain fell undisturbed. I put my head back and felt its cold drops on my face until my cheeks grew numb.

  “Frances?” It was Matthew, and now the kind man was holding the umbrella over me!

  “Come in the house, or you two will both get sick.”

  “It isn’t God, Matthew,” I said. “The destruction, losing Gary. It’s humans alone that have the power to destroy. I don’t know why God didn’t plan it differently, but that’s the way it is. Maybe he just has too much faith in us.”

  We trudged through the muck back to the house. “Where is she?” I asked.

  “She’s running a bath. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Go back to her! We’ll see each other in the morning.

  “Matthew?” I said to his back as he was already on his way upstairs. “I don’t believe for a second that God would punish people like you. If I thought that, I’d stop believing in him right here and now.”

  Matthew stood still, and it was a moment before he turned around. But then his face softened into a smile. “I don’t believe that either,” he replied. “If he wanted to punish us… would he have sent us you?”

  It seemed like the rain would never stop. I didn’t know if the garden could be saved in this weather, but it was the only thing I knew to do, so after breakfast I got to work. I rolled up the chicken wire, stacked up the rest of the posts, and gathered the unripe potatoes that were lying around and threw them in a bucket so I could plant them again later. I picked out plants that couldn’t be saved, and when Hazel showed up at the fence, I was patching the beans with twine and wire. “No wonder. I’ve been ringing forever,” she said. “Are you alone?”

  It was the first time we had seen each other since my night at the Vathareerpurs’. “Not entirely,” I answered. “Matthew is back at work, Amanda is lying in bed. I brought her breakfast, but she said I should leave her alone.” My voice quivered. I gestured to our vegetable garden. “That was her doing, last night. At first I was sort of glad. I thought it would do her good to get it out of her system. But I guess I was wrong.”

  “Do you have another pair of boots? I’ll help you.” Hazel reached for the garden gate and let herself in. I heard her rummaging around in the shed, and she came out wearing Amanda’s boots and rain poncho. “Don’t look, but she’s standing at the window.”

  I swallowed my tears and continued working with doubled energy. I hoped Amanda would recognize from up the
re what that meant: She could throw me out—out of her room, out of her life—but I was still there, waiting, and making myself useful.

  We worked until noon, and the results were impressive: Two-thirds of our garden was raked clean, the surviving vegetables salvaged, the rest on the compost heap. The chicken wire was only temporarily fastened, but the fencing was enough to keep Victory, Winston, and Queenie in, at least for the time being. We took off our boots outside the kitchen door and went inside to make ourselves sandwiches.

  “Perfect timing,” said Amanda, pulling a pie out of the oven. She was completely dressed, pale, but standing—so normal that I could hardly breathe for relief.

  With enviable poise, it was Hazel, not me, who crossed the kitchen and gave her a warm hug. “I’m so very sorry, Mrs. Shepard,” she said gently.

  Amanda smiled. “That’s very sweet of you, Hazel,” she said, stroking my friend’s hair. “Can you stay for lunch, or is your mother waiting for you?”

  “My mother’s expecting me,” answered Hazel to my surprise, since she had just told me exactly the opposite. “See you tomorrow, Frances!”

  It was clear to me that she had only left so Amanda and I could be alone, and my foster mother seemed to figure the same thing, because we exchanged the same tentative, slightly awkward look. She set the pie on the table, sat down, and waited until I had washed my hands.

  I slid onto the bench across from her and looked at her quizzically. Would she say the prayer? Should I do it? Would we just not say it from now on? Several seconds passed and I was just about to reach for the spoon to fill our plates when she suddenly put her hand on mine, closed her eyes, and said a short blessing.