Last night, Louise had read aloud from Michael’s last letter: “To those people who still wonder why we have to be in it, I would say it’s because of our idealism. How can you look at what’s going on and not step up to the plate? More than that, how could any American still be an isolationist after Pearl Harbor? Yes, I guess this war could last for years, maybe many years. It could change everything about the way we live, everything we’re so comfortable with and used to. But there will eventually be a winner, and that winner has to be us and not Hitler. It has to be.”
“Dad?” Billy said. “My bicycle’s worn out.”
Frank nodded. “It sure is, son. But you know you can’t have a new one.”
“Cripes. I don’t see why…” Billy pushed his food around on his plate.
Frank patted his mouth with his napkin and pushed himself back from the table. “Know what, Billy?”
“What.” He stared glumly at his plate.
“There’s nothing wrong with your wanting a new bike; sure it’s only natural. I wish I could give it to you. But there aren’t any new bikes to be had. That’s because the metal’s going to our soldiers. When you do without a bike, you’re helping to put a gun in a man’s hand. Understand? And when the house was kept a little cold last winter, why, that was nothing compared with the cold our boys suffer in their tents, or sleeping on the ground. I know it’s hard to go without the food you want, but think about our soldiers with their lousy C rations, and how glad they’d be to get this…” He looked at Margaret. “What is this again, dear?”
“Ham croquettes.”
“Ham, is it. Well, anyway, Billy, the point is, a fighting soldier rarely gets a hot meal of any kind. If one of our guys could sit at our table tonight, he’d think he was at the Palmer House itself.”
“He wouldn’t like the prune whip,” Billy said.
“He’d love the prune whip!” Frank said, and Tish said, “I like prune whip. What’s wrong with prune whip?”
“You’re fighting the war, too, Billy,” Frank said. “We all are. I can’t think of anything more noble.”
“What about the guys who are really there?” Billy asked. “The ones getting shot at and stuff.”
“Well, of course, that’s the noblest thing of all, and the thing I admire most. Those boys risking their lives every day, for us. Never knowing if—”
“May I be excused?” Louise asked.
“Of course,” Margaret said.
Louise ran upstairs, and Margaret spoke quietly. “Can’t you watch what you say, you two? Now you’ve gone and upset her.” She shook her head. “’Tis a terrible thing, the kind of courtship young people have nowadays. Newly engaged and never even talking to each other. Writing all their hopes and dreams in letters instead of moonin’ and spoonin’ as they ought to be.”
“What’s moonin’ and spoonin’?” asked Binks. He had moved from sitting to draping himself across the seat of the chair so that he could let his arms and head dangle. He liked to do this until he grew dizzy and his stomach hurt, and then he liked to complain about how dizzy he felt and how his stomach hurt him. “Ma? What’s moonin’ and spoonin’?” He slid off the chair and leaned against the table leg with his head in his hands. “Whoa! I’m dizzy!”
Margaret began clearing the table. “Never mind about things that needn’t concern you. Let’s clean up these dishes and get Louise down here for a lovely game of canasta.”
“I’m taking Tommy to the movies,” Kitty said.
“I want to come, too!” Binks said. “Can I come, too?”
“I’ll take you another time,” Kitty told him. “This time it’s just me and Tommy.”
“Yeah, but why can’t I come, too?”
“Aren’t you coming to the dance with us?” Tish asked Kitty. And then, to her parents, “I’ll take Louise to a dance. That’ll take her mind off things.”
“Och, and what an angel you are, to make such a sacrifice,” Margaret said.
Binks stood. “Kitty? Can I come, too?”
“I’m going over to Anthony’s,” Billy said.
“After you take the garbage out,” Binks told him.
“I’m not taking the garbage out. It’s your turn to take the garbage out. I’m going to Anthony’s. I’ll be home by nine or so.”
“No ‘or so,’” Margaret said. “On the dot.”
Binks put his hand over his stomach. “I can’t take the garbage out. I’m sick!”
“It’s your turn!” Billy said. “Ma!”
“I’ll just do it,” Tommy said, and together his parents said, “No you won’t!”
“I don’t see that you have to spend so much time with that Anthony anyway,” Frank said. “He’s eighteen, way too old for you.”
“I turn fourteen in two days.”
“He’s still too old for you.”
“He tried to enlist yesterday,” Billy said.
“And?” Now some admiration came into Frank’s eyes; maybe Anthony was good for Billy after all.
“He has flat feet.”
“Ah,” Frank said. “Let me ask you something, Billy. What do you do with Anthony, anyway?”
“Nuttin’,” Billy said. “I’ll take the garbage out; then can I go?”
“May I,” Margaret said.
Billy smiled. “Sure, you can come, Ma. Bring some prune whip.”
“I GOT A NOTE FROM JULIAN, AND HONEY, I guess it’s okay what he did,” Louise read aloud to her sisters. “About the ring, I mean. I really wanted to put it on your finger myself, and at first I was sore about your seeing it without my being there, to say nothing about him paying for it. A guy likes to buy his girl a ring himself. But I’m going to pay him back the installments I was going to pay Munson’s, so I guess it’s all the same and you get to have it sooner. Gee, I sure hope you like it; I took a long enough time picking it out! And sometime I’m going to give you a bigger ring. And then I’m going to—
“Well, wait a minute,” Louise said. She read to herself for a moment, smiling, then resumed reading from Michael’s letter. “I wonder what it’s like where Julian is. Did you know the Pacific war covers nearly half the planet? From Panama to Singapore is 11,800 miles. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Boggles and saddens it, I think. My love to you, my darling. My love, my all.”
Louise put her letter down, and for a moment none of the girls spoke. Then Kitty said, “I don’t know what else to say to Julian.”
“Not this again,” Tish said, sighing.
Kitty looked at the three-quarters of the page she’d filled. She was using the V-mail form, where the writing paper was also the envelope. V-mail was wonderful. It was free to service personnel, and it got preferential handling so that letters were no longer delayed—sometimes for months—because of the great volume of mail being sent. These form letters were photographed and transferred onto microfilm, and the film was taken to various destinations. At a processing center close to the addressee, the letter was printed onto photographic paper, then delivered.
V-mail was only one page long, and many people still used airmail so that they could write longer letters. But Kitty was struggling to fill this page. She could do it if she wrote big, but if she wrote big, Julian would know she was having trouble coming up with things to say, and that would make him feel bad.
“Tell him about the movie you saw tonight,” Louise said.
Kitty sighed. “I did.” The Paradise Theater had more than three thousand seats, and they’d all been filled, many of them with servicemen, who got to go for free. These boys got lots of things for free: tickets for ball games, boxing matches, and the theater. Rides on public transportation. All the food at the servicemen’s center: hot dogs and sandwiches, cake and pie and cookies and candy. Hard-boiled eggs, cigarettes, coffee, and milk. Toilet supplies and canned goods and fresh produce donated from people’s gardens. Kitty had read in the paper that, in a single evening, five hundred dozen doughnuts had been served. She felt proud of all Chicago was doing, but s
he wondered how it really felt to the boys: Give us your life and we’ll give you some doughnuts! But maybe that was just her. The men seemed as though they truly appreciated everything. One USO center had gotten a letter from a grateful Marine stationed in Guadalcanal, saying, “You know what we talk about in our foxholes while the Jap bullets whiz over us? The Chicago servicemen’s centers.”
“Tell him about some stuff at work,” Tish said, and again Kitty said, “I did.” Helen Turnbull was p.g., she’d written. Rose Ellison had moved in with her sister. (Because her sister’s husband had been killed, but she didn’t tell Julian that.) She’d written that she was going to apply at Douglas Aircraft, so that she could help make the Skymaster. If they didn’t hire her, she’d try the Studebaker Company, which made aircraft engines, the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company, which now made cargo planes, and International Harvester, which made torpedoes.
She wanted to ask Julian whether he was frightened, but she knew he’d never give her a straight answer. She wanted to ask him if he ever thought of her, but wasn’t he supposed to tell her things like that automatically? Even Hank longingly alluded to their brief time together and how pleasant it had been for him, how he sure missed the scent of a nice perfume, the softness of a girl’s skin. Kitty pressed down hard on her pen, and the tip snapped. “Darn it!”
“What’s the matter with you?” Tish asked. She put down her pen—she was using regular stationery because she never ran out of things to say. Tonight she was writing to Warren Mueller, a banker’s son from Albany, New York. Tall guy with curly black hair and nice shoulders. Before the war, he’d gotten a new car every year. He said he thought Tish was a dish, ha ha. Tish had known Warren for exactly one week, and here she was filling up page after page. “Do you say the same thing to every guy?” Kitty had once asked, and Tish had said, “Gosh, no. That would be rude! What if the guys ever met?” Kitty wondered: Was this possible? She supposed so. Tish wrote on and on, a little smile on her face. How could she be so sure the guy would be interested in what she said?
Tish got up for another cup of tea. “Julian is practically your fiancé, for cripes’ sake. You love him! I don’t get it; what’s your problem?”
She sat down and blew on her tea. Louise looked at her expectantly, and Tish sighed. “If you wanted tea, why didn’t you ask me when I was up?”
“Why didn’t you ask me?” Louise answered.
Tish stood. “Okay. Who wants more tea?”
“I do,” Louise sang out.
“Kitty?”
“No.” Kitty didn’t want anything. She wanted to go to bed. She wanted to go to bed and sleep until the war was over.
“Maybe you should try being really honest with Julian,” Louise said gently. “Tell him what’s in your heart.”
Tish said, “Set the table, Mabel; tell him you want a ring.”
“I can’t tell him that!”
“Sure you can,” Louise said. “Not directly, just…” Her face brightened. “You want me to write him? I can say something about how happy I am, and ask when he’s going to propose to you!”
It might not be a bad idea. Julian liked Louise a lot. He wouldn’t object to the question coming from her. Maybe he’d even give her a straight answer—he treated Louise differently than he treated Kitty. More…seriously.
Kitty shrugged. “Okay.” Now she felt better. “Get me some tea, Tish.”
“Kiss my foot.” Tish continued reading another one of the letters she’d gotten that day. Then she said, “Hey, listen to this. This guy, Ron Berman, he’s stationed in Malaysia? And the natives there say ‘light belong cloud’ for lightning. Isn’t that funny? And when they want a haircut, they say, ‘Cut-im grass belong head belong me.’ And a mirror is ‘glass belong look-look.’”
“Pidgin English,” Louise said, continuing to write her letter to Michael.
“How do you know?” Tish asked.
“Read something sometime, why don’t you?”
Kitty busied herself putting a new nib on her pen. She hadn’t known, either.
Tish laughed loudly. “‘New fellow moon he come up!’ That means the first of the month. Oh, brother.”
“You couldn’t speak their language at all, Tish,” Kitty said. She thought of how, in one of his letters, Hank had talked about what a great anthropological bath the Army experience was—how encountering so many different kinds of people, so many different ways of thinking, had broadened him in a very important way. “You shouldn’t act as though you’re superior to people just because they don’t speak English. They might teach you some things, you know? Why, they—”
“Aw, muffle your face in your mouchoir,” Tish said.
A wounded silence. Kitty supposed world peace was a difficult concept indeed; she couldn’t even get along with her sister at their kitchen table.
Again, Tish began laughing. “Just one more,” she begged.
Louise put down her pen. “What.”
“This one’s the best,” Tish said. “This one means ‘accordion.’ ‘Lik lik bockiss’—‘bockiss’ means little box—‘Lik lik bockiss you push him he cry you pull him he cry.’” She looked at them, tears from laughter bright in her eyes.
“That is funny,” Louise said, but she wasn’t smiling. She was writing to Michael, who had heard he would soon be transferred to an active combat zone, and there was nothing funny about that.
Tish started to read more, but Louise told her, with uncharacteristic sharpness, “Be quiet!”
Kitty touched Tish’s hand. She would listen. Her sister whispered in Kitty’s ear, “If you need a bath, they tell you, ‘Skin belong you be stink.’”
“All right, but better not say any more, now,” Kitty whispered back.
“There isn’t any more!” Tish said, triumphantly.
Kitty stared into space while her sisters scribbled away. Those natives and the Scottish and the English and the Americans and the Indians and the Italians and Nazis and Japs, too. A representative from every country at a round table, just like King Arthur’s. Now, boys, let’s see if we can’t come up with a better solution.
She turned back to her V-mail form and wrote Julian that she missed him, that she’d write him tomorrow night to tell him what had happened with her application, signed Love, and began another V-mail to Hank, about her peace plan. She’d tell him her concerns about Tommy, and she’d ask what Hank had been like as a little boy. Yes. She would like to know that. She’d asked Julian once what he was like as a little boy, and he’d answered, “Shorter.”
She’d tell Hank that the sky today was a Fra Angelico blue. Then he would see that she knew something about art, anyway.
“I’m telling Michael to put a little pressure on Julian to pop the question, too,” Louise said.
“Oh!” Kitty said. “Okay.”
Gosh. She’d forgotten all about that.
KITTY CAME BACK TO BED FROM THE BATHROOM, where she’d splashed cold water over her chest. She’d gotten a little carried away; she was dripping clear down to her toes. But who cared? It was so hot, and now the breeze from the attic fan might finally soothe her into sleep. She wanted to get enough rest so that she wouldn’t fall asleep at Mass tomorrow and get a sharp poke in the ribs from her mother. Or worse. Once, seeing that Kitty had drifted off, her mother had reached over and pinched her thigh so hard Kitty had cried out and embarrassed them all. (“Well, you dope, your head was all to the side, and your hat was falling off,” Louise had told her when Kitty wondered aloud how her mother, sitting so far away from her, had noticed that her eyes were closed. “If you’re going to sleep,” Louise said, “sit up straight. And keep your mouth closed!”) Yes, you’d better pay attention during Mass if you were a Heaney. Sometimes there was a surprise quiz during Sunday dinner about the content of the priest’s sermon. Though lately those sermons had all been pretty much the same: how to make sense of war, how to cope with the ongoing bad news, how prayer and faith were more important now than ever.
Kitty did pray; everyone in her family got down on their knees each night beside their beds and bowed their heads. But from the time Kitty was a little girl, she had found it hard to do this. She wasn’t so good at concentrating. She’d start out all right, saying the familiar words to the Our Father or Hail Mary or improvising a bit as the Protestants did, asking God to protect those she loved, asking Him to help her be a better person. But then her mind would drift to the sound her sister’s nose was making, to the hardness of the floor beneath her, to a memory of her and Julian driving down the road together, or laughing hard, or kissing in the moonlight. Worse than that, she might think of what movie she wanted to see next, or how she craved a chocolate bar, or how cute that blouse was that someone at work had worn and how much it must have cost.
If Kitty was the worst in their family at prayer, Tommy seemed best—every time Kitty saw him rise from his knees, he was nearly glowing. He seemed to find genuine peace and inspiration from this oldest of rituals. Kitty wanted to ask him sometimes how he did it, if he really felt the way he looked. But she didn’t want to reveal how hard a task prayer was for her.
Oh, but surely even Father Fleishmann wasn’t perfect at praying, especially these days! Sometimes Kitty wished he would throw up his hands and say, “I can’t make any sense of this, all the evil in the world. There are no words I can say that will console those of you who have lost a child or a husband or a brother or a sweetheart. Let’s just be quiet together for a while, and then go and have coffee and doughnuts.”
Dream When You're Feeling Blue Page 8
