The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  “Oh, my brave, brave boy,” said Pearl, who had worn her yellow church outfit. She reached into her purse and held out a tissue-wrapped parcel. “I lost my husband, years ago, in the Great War, when he was your age. . . .” Her hand was trembling, and she turned to Juliet’s father, as though he might be able to explain her feelings, but he only put an arm around her shoulders; this seemed to fortify her, and she sucked back sniffles with a proud toss of the head. “I would like for you to have this.”

  Tuck unwrapped the gift: the white glove Pearl had worn when shaking Eleanor Roosevelt’s hand.

  “Pearl,” he said softly.

  “It’s the only protection I can offer you.”

  Tuck laughed. “I’ll be the only guy in the army with a woman’s glove.”

  “Don’t try to joke your way out of this moment, young man. Take it, and put it somewhere safe.”

  Tuck rewrapped the gift and placed it in the pocket of his shirt.

  “I’ll bring it back.”

  “Indeed you will,” answered Pearl.

  Tuck beckoned Juliet forward. “Come on, no sulking. You finally get the bathroom to yourself!”

  Juliet struggled to smile. “You won’t forget us. . . .”

  “Of course I will.” He grinned. “But I’ll feel bad about it.”

  He tilted his head to the side so that they stood almost face-to-face. Then he opened his arms and pulled her close. It was a real hug, without guile, and for the first time she could feel his sadness. Juliet sunk into him and closed her eyes. He held her tight and kissed her scalp, and they stood like that for several seconds. When finally his hold began to slacken, Juliet felt such immeasurable loss that she pulled quickly away and swallowed the knot in her throat.

  Their father stepped forward. “Write when you get there, son.”

  “Don’t expect Shakespeare. But I’ll put a pen to paper.”

  “Remember, no foolish heroics. I spent two years piecing boys like you back together. Trust me, a bullet is bigger than you.”

  Tuck saluted him: “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Their father hoisted the duffel and arranged the straps over Tuck’s shoulders, testing their evenness; Juliet remembered how, years earlier, he would fasten Tuck’s schoolbag onto his back each morning. It seemed so long ago, part of an entire life now disbanding in the heat, molecule by molecule.

  Tuck got in line to board. He wore a light-blue dress shirt, bright against his summer tan, and had sheared off his curls the night before so that his head now looked square and somewhat severe. He seemed older. The man before him turned to chat, and Tuck engaged intently, appearing to forget that Juliet and their father and Pearl were there. Tuck nodded, his hands moving in an elaborate description. The size of a fish? Something he’d hauled in for scrap collection? Juliet desperately wanted to know. The man smiled and Tuck laughed—a full-bodied laugh that caused him to readjust his bag. She wanted him to turn back and share the joke; she wanted him to tell the man about his wonderful sister standing right over there. But already it seemed as if Tuck had entered a new world. He belonged to the people on the bus, to the people he would meet in the months and years to come. Juliet’s head felt heavy, loose on her shoulders.

  He stepped forward, turned briefly, and flashed them an apologetic smile before he shook his duffel high on his shoulders and stepped onto the bus; that was it, a smile. It was difficult to see through the windows, but Juliet continued to wave to where she thought Tuck was standing, uncertain whether he was waving back, or even looking. She licked the tears from her mouth.

  CHAPTER 3

  December 1942

  North Africa

  Dear Gang,

  It was a lonely Christmas without you; I hung the photos from home on the tree and our squad made ornaments from empty ration tins. Thank you for the Nelson’s soap and the knit socks; they’re getting plenty of use. I wish I could have sent something back.

  We’re still encamped in the same place. The air is dry and the sun bright. Dozens of cats wander in and out of the tents all day long; I’ve never seen so many cats in my life! Apparently the KP (Kitchen Patrol) went soft and gave them some SPAM for Christmas, and now they won’t ever leave. It’s an odd thing to wake up in a tent in a strange country to the sound of endless meowing.

  Jules, you asked how things are organized. Well, the best I can explain it is—the division is like a city, made up of maybe ten thousand soldiers, the company is your neighborhood, the platoon is your block, and your squad, well, that’s your family. Those are the nine guys you count on to drag you back to safety if you get hit—those are the guys you talk into the night with, pitch tents with, dig trenches with, pray with. I could tell you the names of the streets they grew up on, their favorite colors, their mothers’ birthdays. There isn’t a thing you don’t share, even if you don’t want to. All in all, I admire the hell out of these guys.

  Sergeant Bruce McKnight, the head of our squad, is a Princeton man. His father was a lumberjack, his grandfather a coal miner, so his intellectual bent makes him something of a family exception—and he seems determined to earn stripes while he’s here. He’s the only one who eats his chow with table manners, setting his knife and fork just so on the edge of his tin, and we’re all trying to follow so he doesn’t think we’re barbarians. Glenn Mooney, the best rifleman in the company, carries little clippers dangling from his pack and snips off leaves almost every day to press into a book. Rakowski writes poetry—and I’m no expert but I think it’s god-awful. I’ve managed to get a bit of a makeshift football team going here, and there’s a guy named Geronimo—a genuine Indian—who manages one hell of a tackle.

  Sorry so much got blacked out in my other letters—I’m trying this time to focus on our rec time so you don’t have to wonder about all those crossed-out lines.

  Nothing to worry about, as usual. I’m fast on my feet, and luck seems to be following me so far. I keep the white glove with me at all times.

  Miss you all.

  Love,

  Tucker

  Since he had shipped overseas, Tuck’s letters arrived once or twice a week, but Juliet wrote to him every night. Throughout the day she found herself composing snippets, descriptions of the Victory garden or of a classmate, anything that offered a witty or poetic phrase; she jotted these bits on the edge of the newspaper or the back of the telephone book, tearing off the scraps to shove into her pocket and carefully reassemble on her bed at night, working hard to present her thoughts in a precise and interesting manner. She hoped Tuck would see that even though she was stuck at home, she, too, was maturing.

  How will I describe this to Tuck? she asked herself throughout the day, trying to fill the long, dark gaps that had opened since his departure. Almost every notable moment of her life had been coupled with the anticipation of relating it to Tuck, so that now, finding a quarter on the sidewalk or sighting a zebra swallowtail in their yard left her feeling empty.

  When life in Charlesport felt particularly dreary, or when more than a week lapsed between Tuck’s letters, she would sometimes think back to the day at the bus depot: a simple vehicle had carried Tuck to Fort Branley, and from there he had stormed into the world beyond. The globe seemed divided into Charlesport and everywhere else, and while the latter had always lurked at the fringes of Juliet’s mind, it had seemed a far-off and forbidden place, fortified and gated. But the gate had now swung open, and what lay beyond enticed her. Juliet had begun to look into colleges far from home, in Delaware and Massachusetts, and she tentatively researched a nursing program. All of which she confessed to Tuck in her letters, though from the cursory postscript on his reply, he clearly had doubts about her intent to leave home.

  Don’t forget the blue suitcase! he wrote.

  When Juliet was younger, on long, muggy days, if Tuck was off playing football late and her father was at his office, she had sometimes packed her battered blue suitcase and left notes explaining, in courteous detail, that she was running away. She’d
bought the case at a thrift shop because it held a dazzling collection of rocks and seashells that someone—A. Burney, the tag indicated—had assembled over what must have been decades. She had immediately transferred the gypsum and soapstone and agate onto the shelves above her desk, each item fronted by a typewritten label; the suitcase, however, remained beneath her bed, and when she felt forsaken or had fought with her father, she would stuff it with her belongings and set out into the warm night. Twice she ventured to the corner, the heavy suitcase bumping her knees, but grew frightened and set down the bag. When Tuck came walking home, he called out, “Excellent idea! Where are we going?”

  The second time he opened her suitcase on the sidewalk, puzzling over her Latin dictionary, atlas, and magnifying glass, explaining that she had packed so poorly—was she running off to catch butterflies?!—they would have to go back home. He did not comment on a string-tied packet of their mother’s wartime letters to their father; however, back home he lay down beside her until she fell asleep.

  But Juliet was growing increasingly certain of her intent to leave Charlesport; she did not want to be as Tuck had once described her—a girl who curiously opened every door but never walked through one. As she fell asleep each night, she stared at the map that had replaced her calendar above her bed, stuck with blue pushpins marking what she deduced of Tuck’s movements in North Africa, wondering about the sounds and sights of all those new cities.

  By late spring, as her graduation approached, radio reports said that Axis troops in North Africa had surrendered. Juliet brightened at this news, imagining that Tuck would finally be sent home; instead, a letter from him arrived suggesting that his division was preparing for a major offensive in another region, and that it might be a while before he could write again.

  This marked the dwindling of her brother’s correspondence. His early letters had been pages long, filled with descriptions of encampment life and squad mates—so much so that Juliet had grown jealous of his new family. She felt as if she knew them all, these men who had become like brothers to him. But when Tuck finally wrote again, he said little about the other soldiers; his letters, in general, grew shorter and he was distinctly less playful in his language. After nine months overseas, his letters had become mere paragraphs, somber and cryptic.

  Gang,

  Rain every day and Sergeant McKnight and Geronimo have come down with the flu. Rakowski is teaching me piano on a keyboard he drew on a piece of paper. At night, in the dark, he hums the song, and then shows me the notes when it’s light.

  Sometimes, people aren’t what you think.

  We live in holes, dirt creeping into every sock and collar. Bombs all night. It sounds like the drummer in the marching band went mad.

  Tucker

  Her father turned the page over and set it on the dining table—it was Tuck’s first letter in months. “That seems to be all for now.”

  Her father poured a glass of sherry and looked out the window. Gray hairs dusted his part, and his eyebrows had thinned. “Jules, what is going on with you these days?” he asked, but he did not turn from the window.

  “I have an interesting brochure here from a college in Sweet Briar, Virginia.”

  Busy with various patriotic committees and campaigns, her father and Pearl had been of little assistance in her college research. Juliet had sent away for the paperwork on her own and filled out seven applications for schools all over the East Coast, including a nursing school in Savannah—all of which had recently accepted her.

  “Terrific,” her father said to the window, ignoring the brochure.

  Juliet pulled the college materials back toward her and the table fell silent. Pearl and her father began eating the zucchini casserole made with the last of their weekly butter ration.

  “He’s in the thick of it now,” her father muttered. “I don’t like it.”

  Pearl raised her hand for silence. “How is the scrap sorting, Juliet?”

  “Excellent,” she said, though she had stopped going weeks earlier, tired of sitting in the corner, her hands slick with grease, while across the room other girls folded gum wrappers into miniature airplanes and primped for their evening dates.

  But for her father and Pearl, the war was all that mattered now, and whatever Juliet achieved in school or hoped for her future would be lost in the discussion of events in Tunisia and Sardinia. US bombers were raiding Sicily in advance of an invasion. It was announced that children had been evacuated from the Channel ports in France.

  “I’m going to be a nurse,” Juliet suddenly said, though she had not realized her decision until she spoke the words. “They’re setting up an accelerated program in Savannah, like the Cadet Nurse Corps they’re talking about. I can be certified in a year and genuinely help with the war. College will always be there.”

  Her father looked at her with startled affection; he touched his heart. “Like your mother,” he said softly.

  A crooked smile lit Pearl’s face. “That would be quite something, Juliet.”

  She arrived in Savannah in June, two weeks after high school graduation. Her sixty classmates were plucky, compassionate girls, the daughters of bakers and mechanics, girls who could mend clothes and tie slipknots and mix gimlets over a dormitory bathroom sink. Juliet spent her days learning intravenous drips, sutures, wound dressing, and surgical assistance, and, in her favorite class, Patient Encounters, students role-played nurse and patient under the supervision of Head Nurse Mercer; somehow Juliet always ended up with a girl playing the patient a bit crazy, pulling at her hair and screaming for morphine. To Nurse Mercer’s delight, Juliet was entirely unmoved by the hysterics and delivered her line, “We must wait until the doctor returns to determine the proper dosage,” with such genuine dispassion that even the girl playing patient finally said, “Jeez, you don’t rattle easily.”

  Returning to her dorm room at night, Juliet soaked her aching feet in a metal pan of warm water and worked lotion into her palms and elbows. Despite her exhaustion, and despite the fact that she had not received a letter since starting school, she wouldn’t go to sleep until she had written a full page to Tuck.

  The school days stretched and folded into one another, punctuated by the fifteenth of every month, when Nurse Mercer would hold a party in her office for the five girls getting degrees. Over lemon cupcakes and white wine, the graduating nurses tipsily boasted of their plans to zip straight off to basic training and then ship overseas. Some had already bought cameras and leather travel journals. This always produced in Juliet a tinge of envy. She’d be seventeen at graduation, so she would have to wait to enlist. Until then, she could work only in a civilian hospital, probably somewhere in Georgia or South Carolina.

  She still caught a bus back to Charlesport every Friday in time for dinner. Although she was always momentarily struck by sadness when she saw that the entry table held no new V-mails, her father and Pearl and the house itself were still some connection to Tuck. Juliet would sit at the dinner table, describing her classes and instructors, imagining Tuck across from her, his hair wet from his postpractice shower, ravenously shoveling his food; she tried to anticipate the moments in her narrative when he would have laughed or rolled his eyes.

  And then, a week shy of Christmas, when Juliet returned home for dinner, she noticed that Pearl—who spent most evenings on the porch rocker knitting socks for Tuck, and who usually called out a greeting long before Juliet had even reached the walkway—was nowhere to be seen. Inside, her father sat by the coffee table, staring at his chessboard; but the board was empty and pieces lay scattered across the floor. A white bishop, stranded beneath the window, rocked gently over the floorboards, caught in a breeze. As she closed the door behind her, her father did not look up.

  “Papa, are you okay?”

  At the sound of her voice, the kitchen door swung open and Pearl entered with an apron hanging limply from her neck. Behind her, the kitchen was dark, and she looked at Juliet’s father, shaking her head.

 
“Delaying won’t help anything, Philippe.”

  Her father patted at his pockets until from the side of his trousers he extracted a folded beige piece of paper.

  “That says nothing, Philippe.”

  Pearl led Juliet to the sofa and drew in an enormous breath. “This afternoon we received a telegram from the War Department informing us that Tuck . . . has gone missing in action.”

  “Missing,” repeated Juliet. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She had heard about such cases, had tried, at times, to prepare herself for such an eventuality, but now her thoughts were scampering, trying to make sense of this word that seemed to say everything and nothing. “So this means he’s a prisoner?” she asked.

  Pearl cast her eyes at Juliet’s father, who gazed at his empty chessboard. “They can’t say what happened,” said Pearl. “The telegram means they simply have no idea.”

  “Prisoner is a decent guess,” her father said.

  Pearl glanced all around the room, as though somewhere in the corner or behind the sofa she might find assistance. Finally, she cleared her throat. “It is important that we not give up hope, but also that we begin to accept the possibility that we might not see Tuck again.”

  “They said missing. They tell you when they’re killed. It’s called KIA. I hear these things in school. I’m not living on the moon.”

  “I understand,” Pearl conceded.

  “So he’s still alive, but missing.”

  “Alive indeed,” her father said emptily, and Juliet saw that a tear had welled in his eye.

  “Let me see that.” Juliet grabbed the paper and studied the words. It was a Western Union telegram, with a few sentences typed in purple. Tuck had been missing in Italy since November 11. “If other information or further details are received,” it ended, “you will be promptly notified.”

  “I know this is frightening,” Pearl said. “I know you think I am being cruel, you think I am being heartless. You want me to tell you that everything will be okay. You think that is love, that is kindness. So that you can grasp at little shreds of hope for years, always listening for the doorbell, always feeling your heart pound as you approach the mailbox, thinking, maybe today, then fighting back tears as you go to sleep each night because you still know nothing. . . . Child, I am telling you a very ugly truth to save you from unending despair. Let us slowly begin to shed our tears, to grieve your brother.” At this, Pearl set her hand on Juliet’s arm but Juliet pulled away.