Frangie cuts the old, yellowed bandage with a pair of blunt-tipped scissors. The wound was a through-and-through on Frank’s right arm, with the bullet managing to pass between the ulna and the radius, chipping the ulna but not breaking either bone.
Frangie uses gauze, alcohol, and distilled water to carefully clean the wound, teasing away dried blood and shreds of cotton.
“How’s it look?” Frank asks.
“How’s it look to you?” Frangie teases. Frank is a staff sergeant, a tough soldier by all accounts, but he does not like the sight of his own blood, not even a little. He keeps his head averted, arm propped on the little tray that Frangie carries from bed to bed. “Looks good to me,” Frangie says after he refuses to respond. She leans close and sniffs the wound. “Smells good too.”
This is a trick she’s picked up from one of the doctors, a pacifist from Cincinnati with too much experience with gangrene. You’ll smell it before you see it, he’d told her.
Having long since become stiffly ambulatory, Frangie has begun to help out on the ward, replacing bandages, taking temperatures, doling out medication, and holding hands and offering reassurance.
Her broken leg still aches when she stands or walks for too long, but she is long past the need for morphine. There’s a new, smaller cast on her leg, but aside from that, and the missing finger, and some shrapnel scars scattered around her body—little arcs or twists or dimples of pinkish flesh against the black—she shows no obvious signs of her near-death experience. She has lost fifteen pounds—quite a lot on her small frame—but paradoxically this makes her seem larger, somehow, harder and stronger.
In fact she has taken advantage of the sketchy rehabilitation equipment to begin a regime of strengthening her arms, legs, and back. Her wounds, and the subsequent illness, have left her feeling vulnerable. Her experience has also had two seemingly contradictory effects on her thinking: on the one hand she feels the pain of her patients with exquisite sympathy, sympathy so deep it almost seems to make their wounds hers.
But on the other hand, she now knows the difference between serious pain and the mere discomfort Frank is feeling. And while she is patient, she is not above teasing the less stoic patients.
“Yep, looks fine. Should be no problem now having Dr. Stuart saw that thing right off.”
“What? What are you . . . Oh, dang it, Miss Frangie! You’re trying to get under my skin.”
She grins as she finishes winding a new bandage around his arm. “There you go, you big baby.”
They call her Miss Frangie. She’s not a nurse, she’s not a doctor, nor is she an orderly like Harder. She has no official position in the hospital and is essentially a volunteer, but far more capable than the barely trained British women who so generously volunteer. Somehow “Miss Frangie” has become her title, position, and name, all in one.
Every day she checks in with the officer on duty to see whether her orders have come through. But day after day the answer is the same, “Nope. Nothing for you, Miss Frangie. Guess you’ll just have to stay here.”
Here is not a bad place to be. She follows the war news on the BBC and in the papers, and between the official reports and the rather less optimistic tales she hears from wounded soldiers, she knows what’s happening in Italy. It does not sound like anything she wants to be a part of, though she worries about Sergeant Green. And the rest too, but mostly Walter Green.
Here she has a nice clean bunk in an overheated room she shares with three American nurses and a Polish anesthetist, all female. Every morning there is a hot breakfast followed by a hotter shower. Her uniforms are professionally laundered and pressed and contain no lice. She has no gear to haul, no trucks to unload, no paperwork to fill out, and aside from the occasional air raid warning, no reason to be afraid.
Best of all, she is getting to know Harder better. He is fire to her soothing balm, but once she lets him have his rant about the oppressed workers and the valiant comrades in the USSR, he can be great fun. They talk, they play board games or cards with patients, they work, each in their own function, and they take walks into the village.
And they talk about Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June of 1921.
They talk as well of the lynchings that used to happen several times a week, but have died down a bit since the twenties, though Harder of course had a long list of more recent atrocities. He’s doing that as they walk—slowly, given Frangie’s leg—through the little village. It’s cold, but not miserably so, except when the breeze freshens and cuts through their field jackets, and even through the very welcome scarves knitted and donated by British women and folks back home.
“They lynched a soldier out of Fort Benning. Lynched him in full uniform!” And his stories are not limited to lynchings and burnings. “They promoted three colored men at a Packard plant up in Detroit? Just three. Twenty-five thousand white workers went out on strike. Know what they said, those patriotic white boys? Said, ‘We’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work alongside a Nigra.’”
“Maybe all this”—she waves in a way meant to encompass the village, the hospital, the air base beyond, and the entirety of the war—“will change things.”
Harder laughs cynically. “Nothing is going to change, Frangie. Nothing changes without revolution, a socialist people’s revolution.”
Frangie steers the conversation onto safer ground by pointing to a flight of bombers passing by overhead, on their way to Germany.
Harder is still a fire-breather, still naive in Frangie’s eyes, despite his grand allusions to Marx and Lenin and the Soviet this and the Soviet that. Most difficult of all for Frangie is the fact that he sneers at the faith she relies on. The opiate of the masses.
And yet, much of what he says gets through. The tales of lynchings, of beatings, of castrations, of the fear that pervades the South and has now moved north as black people follow the defense industry jobs into Chicago and Los Angeles and Detroit.
She has not forgotten the white sergeant who tried to rape her. She has not forgotten the slurs and the open hatred she’s gotten from white troops. She does not ignore the fact that even now white officers command black troops, and white generals try their best to assign black units to the most demeaning tasks.
And now that she knows the truth of Tulsa in June of 1921, she cannot look at her own brother’s face, at the color of his skin, without being forced to imagine their mother’s suffering.
There are good white people, she tells herself. She’s met good white people. And all people, all people of all colors, are the children of God, all sinners, all in need of redemption through the blood of Christ. But her imagination tortures her, playing again and again what must have happened to her mother, over and over like an eternal newsreel, each image more lurid and horrifying than the one before.
They cut deep, those images.
“Miss Frangie?” It’s a corporal striding purposefully toward them from behind.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Colonel wants to see you.”
This is tantamount to being summoned to meet Moses or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Frangie has had no dealings at all with the base commander. No reason on earth why she should, she’s a lowly detached medic awaiting orders. The distance between Frangie Marr and a colonel is vast and unbridgeable in her mind.
“But . . . why?” she asks.
The corporal shrugs. “Colonel tells captain, captain tells lieutenant, loot tells me, and here I am telling you.”
Frangie glances at Harder for support, but Harder just frowns, no doubt annoyed at having his latest sermon interrupted.
Frangie follows the corporal to a jeep and is then driven to the air base and the HQ building, a grand estate that has been ceded to the military by its owner, an earl or a count or whatever—Frangie has never been clear on what those titles mean.
Her fear grows with each minute of the trip. Has the colonel somehow gotten word that she’s talking revolution with her Communist brother? One thing is certain: i
t’s trouble. She is in some sort of trouble.
But apparently the trouble can wait as she is told to take a place in the small waiting room outside the colonel’s office. She takes a seat. A white lieutenant, also waiting, sniffs noisily and moves ostentatiously to the seat farthest from her. But the colonel’s secretary brings her a cup of tea with milk and sugar in the British style, which she’s come to like.
She waits and sips and wishes she had something to read. The lieutenant is called in. She waits some more. The lieutenant leaves. She waits as a pair of privates arrive and are shown immediately into the office. She waits as they emerge with relieved smiles on their faces.
Frangie waits as six different individuals are shown in, one after another, and the hours slowly tick away on the wall clock. Finally, at what must be the last hour of the colonel’s day before heading off to dinner, she is summoned. The kind secretary shows her in.
The colonel is Air Corps, tall, distinguished looking with gray temples and extravagant, sandy eyebrows.
She advances to an imaginary line on the floor before the colonel’s desk and salutes.
The colonel looks at her with what feels to Frangie like naked hostility.
“So you’re the little Nigra who crawled under a tank?”
He has not returned her salute, which leaves her standing at attention, right index finger on her right eyebrow, waiting.
“Sir?”
“I don’t suppose we need to ask how it happens that some coon gets himself trapped under a tank.”
“I . . . Sir, they told me he—”
“Goldbricking, if I know my Nigras. Avoiding work. Is that it, Marr? Was he shirking?”
“I don’t believe so, sir. I think he was green and didn’t—”
“Are you contradicting me?” He finally tosses her an indifferent salute.
“I only know what they told me, sir,” she says, lowering her hand at last.
“Well, I’m telling you: he was shirking, like you people do. Isn’t that right, Marr?”
He is directly challenging her to contradict him. Frangie feels herself melting into her boots, withering beneath his hard glare. “If you say so, sir.”
“You’re goddamned right about that: if I say so. And I do say so, and do you know how I know? Because I know the Nigra, that’s how. I grew up on a large farm in Mississippi, and we . . . employed . . . your kind to pick cotton and never once did I see a Nigra really work hard.”
It was not a question. No answer is possible. So she stands at attention feeling small and helpless and bewildered.
“Now this,” the colonel says. He holds up a piece of paper. “Goddamn insult to the white boys out there giving their lives for freedom. They won’t be getting a medal, you can be damn sure of that, because they don’t have the president’s wife nagging and bullying for them.”
Now Frangie is left to pick out words and phrases and try to piece them together, make some kind of sense of them. But her mind is at sea, lost and confused.
“You have anything to say other than yassuh, nosuh?”
“No, sir,” she says.
“At ease.” He twirls the paper toward her. She makes a grab at it but misses and has to stoop to pick it up off the floor.
“Take that and get your black ass off my base. Dismissed.”
Frangie flees the room, and the building, and finding no transportation waiting, begins the long, chilly walk back to the hospital on her aching leg. She waits until she is well clear of the HQ estate, clear off the manicured grounds, out onto the hedge-lined road with the sun dropping fast and the shadows lengthening before she tries, at last, to read the paper.
It is a set of orders for her.
It takes her several tries, starting, stopping, and restarting, to make sense of the official language.
She is to take the earliest available transportation to HQ First US Army Group (FUSAG) at Dover, United Kingdom. There is some detail—a unit, an officer she’s to report to—but still Frangie can make no sense of it until she sees two words:
Silver Star.
She stops walking. Stops breathing, as she reads:
The President of the United States, authorized by act of Congress, has awarded the Silver Star to:
And then, centered on the page, her name and her rank.
And below that, what is labeled as the citation, which begins:
Corporal Francine Marr distinguished herself for gallantry . . .
It goes on to describe how she had crawled beneath the tank. And then it talks about the day she was wounded in action and “Despite her own severe wounds, and with indifference to the enemy fire directed at her, Corporal Marr continued to treat injured soldiers . . .”
This last part baffles Frangie. She has a vague memory of trying to close a man’s stomach wound after she’d been injured, but the citation makes it seem she’d done more than that. Apparently she had treated three soldiers, saving one from almost certain death, before succumbing to her injuries and being evacuated.
“Well,” Frangie says to no one but a horse standing in the field. “I wonder what Harder will make of this?”
36
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NAPLES, ITALY
Colonel Jon Herkemeier comes to see her every day. Sometimes he takes his lunch with her in the room they’ve given her all to herself. She has a balcony wide enough to accommodate a table and two chairs and, weather permitting, Rainy likes to be out of doors. Today, however, will not be an al fresco day. It is raining steadily and, like everyone else who thought Italy was always warm and sunny, Rainy has long since been disabused of that notion.
Rainy’s quarters are as luxurious as a five-star hotel. The room has high ceilings framed in massive wooden moldings. There are oil portraits on the wall, mostly gloomy, dark things showing various Italian notables in Renaissance tights and early-nineteenth-century uniforms. But one has caught her eye, a portrait of a thirtyish man with a bulbous nose and protruding eyes and an expression that suggests he is inclined to be amused. In fact he looks as if he is preparing a witty remark and will deliver it just as soon as the artist leaves him alone. It’s said to be a genuine Antonello da Messina, not an artist Rainy has heard of, but evidently somewhat famous.
She has taken to talking to the portrait at times when she needs distraction. She calls the man Pip, for no real reason except that he looks like a Pip, and she enjoys saying the word with its two percussive Ps.
“Well, Pip, I don’t think I like the weather in your country. Say what? With a name like Rainy I should love this weather? Say what, old Pip?”
She has been given no duties, she is on R and R, rest and recuperation. Military Intelligence has better facilities for such things than regular GIs would get—no villas for regular GIs, and there was a time that might have bothered her, but she doesn’t have the energy for fairness. Her days are spent reading books from the villa’s library. She’s already worked her way through Machiavelli’s The Prince, an Italian translation of The Great Gatsby, and most of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original Italian.
When not reading books she reads and rereads letters from home with all their worry about her and all their relief that she is well. Aryeh has even managed to write, though reading between the lines, Rainy fears he is having a hard slog in the Pacific. Curse words have started to slip into his speech, and snide remarks about “our lords and masters with the stars on their shoulders.”
She has the freedom of the villa but rarely ventures out. Her face is no longer swollen, but her bruises are still in evidence, and while she is recovering her strength, she tires easily and walks hunched like an old woman, holding on to the marble rails as she goes up- or downstairs. Her hair is just starting to grow back in. Her appearance causes people to stop working and stare after her with sober, concerned expressions.
So she mostly stays in her room and is able to have her meals brought to her there. Breakfast with Pip. Lunch with Herkemeier. Suppers with Pip and a book. Day after day.
Now she goes to her balcony, staying under cover so the rain sheets just in front of her face. She closes her eyes and savors the chilly mist. And when she opens her eyes again she sees Colonel Herkemeier hurrying through the garden, his briefcase held above his head to shield himself from the downpour.
“It’s not lunchtime yet, is it, Pip? Oh, you don’t have a watch? Not invented in your day, eh? Well, sorry, old fellow, but I don’t think they’d like me painting one on for you.”
Two minutes later a very damp and somewhat out of breath Herkemeier knocks on her door.
“How are you today, Rainy?” he asks, a standard greeting—they have set titles aside for now—but that is not a standard expression on his face. Herkemeier has something he wants to tell her, and it shines from him.
“What’s going on, Jon?” she asks.
He lays his briefcase on a side table, opens it, withdraws an envelope, and draws out several sheets of paper.
“You might want to sit down,” he says.
She takes his advice and sits in a remarkably uncomfortable but no doubt valuable antique chair.
He remains standing, unfolds the pages, and begins to read. “The President of the United States, authorized by act of Congress, has awarded the Silver Star to Sergeant Elisheva Schulterman, US Army.”
He lowers the paper to gauge her reaction. When she stares blankly he goes on.
“Sergeant Schulterman parachuted behind enemy lines in North Africa during . . .”
He reads and Rainy stares, first at him, then at the rug, then up at Pip, who is amused, as always. The citation begins with her parachuting behind enemy lines in North Africa. Then it talks of a secret mission that had her landing in Italy months before the Allied invasion at Salerno. This part is short on detail—secrecy, of course—so there is no explanation of the nature of her mission, only that it was of “the greatest importance to the war effort.” And it mentions heroic resistance to capture, and resistance to torture at the hands of the Gestapo.
Torture. She hates hearing that word.
Silver Stars Page 34
