Things Invisible to See

by Nancy Willard

  “Good-night, Hal,” she said to the picture.

  She opened the window a crack and pulled up the covers.

  Silently, she began to weep.

  18

  V-Mail

  Ben Harkissian to Clare Bishop

  Fort Hood, Texas

  February 3, 1942

  DEAR CLARE,

  Today we faced real bullets. A couple of machine guns are stuck at the top of the hill and they’re pointed to send crossfire about a yard above the ground. Sergeant Klinehart took twenty of us a hundred yards off and told us to go after those guns. The course is full of trenches with parapets. The shellholes are mined, the barbed-wire entanglements are awful, there are dynamite charges to hurry the slowpokes, and everybody has heard stories of people whose heads got blown off—the line of fire is about eighteen inches over your head.

  When I got the signal, I tore through fifteen yards of bush and headed for the first trench, and the machine gun started hammering away, and I’m pushing myself along the dirt, and something explodes to my left, I’m less than twenty yards from the trench and I come to the barbed wire. I start picking my way through but the leg of my pants gets caught and I can’t work it loose and the bullets are flying and finally I just rip through. My pants are in rags from top to bottom. On to the next trench, fast. Dynamite behind, bullets overhead. I finally made it to the safety trench and was waiting for the last guy to make it through and I thought, I could get killed in this war.

  You know, I thought I understood why I joined the army: to serve my country, to start a different life. Now I wish the army hadn’t taken me. I wish I had flat feet like Willie. I wish I were in the medical and could save something, or put something together. What made me think I belonged with a unit of tank destroyers?

  Any more visits from the mystery man Knochen? I don’t understand him. I’ll never understand him. I haven’t got time to worry about him, what with all the stuff I’ve had thrown at me these last few days. Everything I do, the thought of you is with me. Eating, drinking, sleeping. I wonder if you’ve pulled one of your out-of-the-body fast ones and maybe you really are with me.

  Tell your Ancestress if it’s not too much trouble to keep an eye out for me. I don’t want to get killed and I don’t want to kill anybody. I could use some help.

  Love,

  Ben

  WRITE!

  Stilts Moser to His Mother, Ernestina

  February 8, 1942

  Dear Mom,

  First, I just want you to know that I’m fine. I haven’t gone off the base into town. I don’t want any trouble from the Alabamans, who are not going to welcome me with open arms, that’s for sure. I read the Birmingham News, the Chicago Defender, and a few local papers. The folks here seem to worry more about Negroes than about winning the war.

  The riots in Detroit really upset me. Why doesn’t Roosevelt step in? The army took me to fight for my country. I’d rather stay home and fight for our own selves. What I’m living through now seems like a nightmare that we’ll have to put up with till we win this war. I haven’t changed much except I feel a lot older.

  Send me a picture of Red, if you can get him to sit still. That dog is nicer than a lot of people I’ve met here. But don’t worry. I’ve learned to obey orders and keep out of trouble.

  I hope your leg is better. Please go to a doctor. You don’t have to tell Cold Friday you went. Or you can put the blame on me.

  Love,

  Stilts

  Sol Lieberman to Clare Bishop

  February 8, 1942

  Ann Arbor, Michigan

  Dear Miss Bishop,

  You don’t know me, but I am a friend of your mother’s. My mother is Mrs. David Lieberman (Deborah) and she knows your mother. So in a way we have already met, though not face to face.

  I’ve heard a good deal about your accident from my mother. I hope to be a doctor someday, if the war doesn’t finish us all off. My uncle is a doctor, and he told me a story that I think may interest you. A man came to my uncle and told him that he woke up one morning stone deaf. His wife had died in a car accident the month before, and he got the shakes whenever he climbed into a car. My uncle told the man he couldn’t cure his deafness, but maybe he could cure his fear of cars.

  The first day my uncle drove to the man’s house and they sat together in the back seat. The man poured sweat and held my uncle’s hand. The next day they sat in the back seat and discussed the weather. They wrote messages on a pad and passed it back and forth. The next week they sat in the front seat, half an hour a day, for a whole week. When a month passed, my uncle decided the man was ready for his first ride. He was wrong. The man threw up. I won’t go into the whole story, but this happened three months ago, and now the man is driving again and he can hear better than ever. Now that gas is rationed, he said, you’ve taught me how to drive. Now that the news is terrible, you’ve taught me how to hear.

  I’m telling you this story because I believe if you learn to play baseball, you might get well faster. I know you think you can’t do much in a wheelchair, but this is not true. You can throw. You can catch. You can call balls and strikes. Not everybody who plays the game is perfect. Three Finger Brown was one of the best pitchers in the National League.

  I’m not the best player myself, but I know the game. My uncle says you can learn something from everyone. Please call me if you want my help.

  Yours truly,

  Sol Lieberman

  Hal Bishop to Helen Bishop

  February 10, 1942

  Dear Helen,

  The trip here was very pleasant. I wish I could tell you something about where I live and what I’m doing in California, but I’d only give the censor extra work. So you’ll have to be satisfied with a P.O. box number.

  Tomorrow is the anniversary of a big event, probably the most important in my life, and the one responsible for my present happiness. I don’t think anyone else could have put up with my idiosyncrasies as well as you have, and I know that I could never love anyone else as much. I don’t say as much about it as I should, perhaps, but I love you very much and always shall. You have made and still make me very happy, and with our wonderful daughter I have no reason to envy anyone, and I would not change places with anyone.

  I’ve written to Dr. Kellogg about Clare’s case. I hope to take her to the San if she has not improved when I return, although I understand that Dr. Kellogg has moved to less elegant quarters (and less expensive), and the days when you could talk to Henry Ford about his colon or Johnny Weissmuller about his blood pressure are over.

  Heaps of love,

  Hal

  Clare Bishop to Ben Harkissian

  February 11, 1942

  Dear Ben,

  I’m enclosing a letter from Sol Lieberman, a friend of yours. Now hold your breath: he’s teaching me how to play baseball. He says it will help me walk again, though God knows I can’t do anything with the ball but throw it. I’ve had two lessons, and this morning I thought I felt a slight tingling in my right heel. Maybe I’m coming back to life.

  Sol is a wonderful teacher. Before he introduced himself, he’d already decided we didn’t need a big field. We could use the orchard across the street. I was awfully glad, since it takes me a year and a day to go anywhere, and I get very self-conscious about holding other people up. Sol put an old armchair in the middle of the orchard, in the snow. I watched him from the window in the upstairs hall. Then he came up to my room and we talked for a few minutes and he asked me if I was ready to start, and I said yes, and he picked me up and carried me across the street. (It’s cold here. I wore my heavy coat and a blanket—not ideal for easy movement.)

  Sol put a wastebasket full of baseballs next to me and asked if I’d played any softball before my accident. I said no, but I could swim. That made us both laugh, and from then on we trusted each other. He tied red ribbons around three trees to mark first base, second, and third, and he told me to aim for his glove. I asked him if we’d have to practice
catching, and he said not till I felt ready. He knew I was afraid of the ball, and he assured me that everybody is afraid of the ball at one time or other, and that the man who beans a player feels worse than the man who gets hit. He added that he was sure the person who hit me felt awful.

  “I want to show you three basic pitches,” he said, just as if I were going into the Majors tomorrow. “The fastball, the curve, and the fadeaway. We’ll start with the fadeaway. That’s the slowest.”

  My slow ball was very slow indeed. I couldn’t throw it more than a couple of feet. Sol came in close.

  “Aim for my glove,” he said.

  When he saw I was getting tired, he sat down on the ground beside me and reminded me that I was now part of a great tradition. According to his uncle, baseball is older than the Torah. He also told me that Christy Mathewson was the greatest pitcher who ever lived and Babe Ruth is the greatest hitter and Ty Cobb the greatest base runner and Joe DiMaggio the greatest base stealer. He told me that Lou Gehrig would have been a bigger star if he hadn’t played in the shadow of Babe Ruth. And he said I should know the statistics of the great players and loaned me his book of rules and ordered me to study it.

  The next day we commenced my second lesson, and soon my arm felt as if it were no longer part of me. I don’t mean only that it was tired. I mean it was free, it moved in a way the rest of me hasn’t moved for months. I thought it might fly off by itself for parts unknown. People in Poughkeepsie would look up and see an arm flying among the birds. Twice Mother has invited Sol for dinner but nothing is kosher in our house, hence we have nothing he can eat, so she has given up. At night I close my eyes and see him ducking and running among the apple trees, glove raised like a giant paw.

  Sunday Mrs. Brewster called to ask if I wanted a ride to Friends’ Meeting. The last two times she called I said no. It just seemed such a horrendous effort, and I dreaded everyone staring at me. I remember one Sunday last year when a boy came into Meeting on crutches with his trousers folded up and pinned where his leg had been. I’d heard about the accident but didn’t know he’d lost a leg. The normal waiting-for-the-spirit silence deepened to one of pain and shock. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me that way. But after the second lesson with Sol, I found it didn’t matter, perhaps because I no longer feel sorry for myself. So I said yes, I’d go.

  And I’m glad I went. There never were many young people in Meeting and there are even fewer now. A number of people are speaking to the question of how they remained pacifists in the last war. Mr. Brewster was a CO during the war and got sent to an army prison where he wouldn’t even pick up a broom. He spent most of the war in the hospital with one thing or another, starting with typhus. Another man was a news photographer in the Navy and carried a gun all through the war but never fired it. Just before he went home, he took a couple of shots at a log to see if the gun really worked.

  In the afternoon I went to a work party at the Brewsters’ house. They have a Polish girl living with them, a refugee, who is still afraid to speak above a whisper. I don’t know if I told you about the work parties. Half a dozen women sit in the living room among heaps of used clothing. We go over it piece by piece, we mend it, and we talk about the war. Sometimes we sing. I learned that a delegation of Friends was sent by the General Meeting to persuade Hitler that he should beat his swords into ploughshares.

  Mother rolls bandages twice a week at the Red Cross and works on her square for the afghan the play-reading group is making for the soldiers. Nell is still dating Bill and they are still trying to avoid his wife, Heidi. Last week they almost succeeded. Mother had hung some blankets on the line to air, and Nell and Bill slipped between two of them and simply vanished. Heidi raved and roared and threatened. An hour later they showed up, claiming that they had been kidnapped by Martians but all particulars of the event had been erased by a mysterious ray administered to them before they were released.

  I’m supposed to be keeping up with my schoolwork. The math is beyond me; it’s also beyond Nell and Mother. So much for math. I read a little French but not very energetically. And novels, though all we have in the house are Poe and Dickens. I haven’t been to the library in ever so long.

  I do a lot of drawing. I did a good portrait of Nell, but she didn’t like the little lines around her mouth and the shadows under her eyes, and last night she sneaked into my room and erased them.

  Mr. Knochen hasn’t been back, but I think about him a lot. Ben, be careful. I will ask my Ancestress to help you when I see her again, but when will I see her? Maybe she won’t come anymore. Mother told me she lost most of her power over the invisible after she fell in love with Papa. You have to give up one for the other, she said. Most people don’t have room for both.

  I love you. So perhaps the Ancestress won’t come, ever again.

  On the other hand, she might. She comes when she’s needed. But I can’t ask her. She comes in her own way.

  Love,

  Clare

  Sol Lieberman to Ben Harkissian

  February 15, 1942

  Dear Ben,

  No doubt Clare has already written you that I’m teaching her baseball. I think if she gets to know the game, maybe she’ll move a little faster down the road to a cure.

  I wish the news from home were all good, but it’s not. Durkee was killed in action in the Philippines. I feel just awful about it. And now that everybody on our old team has enlisted but me, I have to keep reminding myself that when the war is over, people are still going to need doctors.

  Tell Clare that you’re the one responsible for putting her in a wheelchair. If you get killed, God forbid, and somebody else tells her, how do you think she’ll feel? It’s more important to ask her forgiveness than God’s. God will always be there, He can wait. But you and me and Clare and the rest of us—who knows when we’ll be taken?

  Take care of yourself—

  Your old pal,

  Sol

  Ben Harkissian to Clare Bishop

  Fort Hood, Texas

  February 20, 1942

  Dear Clare,

  This is the hardest letter I’ll ever have to write. And I hope I don’t lose you for writing it. I couldn’t bear that right now. The chance of seeing you again is what keeps me going.

  I’m the one that hit you with the ball. A bunch of us were fooling around on the golf course, across from Island Park. George Clackett pitched me a ball and I hit it. I never saw where it went. But I read about you in the paper and I wanted to tell you but I kept putting it off. If I get killed, I want you to know the truth, and I want you to know it from me.

  Write. Write soon. Or call. It’s awfully hard for me to get a call through to the outside. Every night there are a hundred men in line for the telephone. We’ll be going overseas soon. They don’t tell you where you’re going till you get there. I’ve learned to kill in a hundred different ways. I’ve learned how we kill and how the enemy kills. Steel darts, butterfly bombs, personnel mines, castrators (you step on one, it blows your groin out). Oh, God, I wish I could ask forgiveness for everything I’m going to have to do. I don’t want to kill. I wish I could bandage the wounded or set the broken wings of birds.

  Love,

  Ben

  P.S. You keep working out with Sol. That tingling is a good sign.

  Clare Bishop to Ben Harkissian

  Ann Arbor, Michigan

  February 28, 1942

  Dear Ben,

  When I read your last letter, I nearly fell out of my chair. I won’t tell you all the thoughts that raced through my head. What matters is this. If you hadn’t hit that ball, we’d never have met. And I think my real life started from that moment. Oh, I ate and slept and walked around, but I was asleep. When I think about my life B.B. (before Ben), the days are all the same color, they run into each other like water. There’s so much that slipped over me, so much I didn’t notice or remember.

  Meeting you the way I did was an awful way to wake up. But I’d rather be awake than aslee
p.

  We hear a lot about keeping awake now. Keep awake! The enemy never sleeps! In Meeting one of the elders made my heart stop when he stood up and spoke a passage from George Fox’s journal: “Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave unto me another smell than before, beyond what words can utter.” I believe the flaming sword is double-edged—it wakes you and it wounds you, and I thought of you and me, and if life is being taken from us, I want to be awake when it happens. I want to know what I’ve lost.

  If you want to save things, you should be here. We’re saving scrap. Paper, old tires, iron. I’d like to scrap this chair. I wish somebody would come up to me and say, “Take up your chair and walk.” Are there still people around who can say that and mean it?

  My baseball lessons go on. Sol is a wonderful teacher. And I love you.

  Clare

  Davy McGuinley to Hal Bishop

  [postcard]

  19

  A Greedy Eye

  AFTER BEN LEFT, WILLIE and his mother began every morning with a discussion of Marsha.

  “It’s just as well he’s rid of her,” said Willie.

  “Just as well,” agreed Wanda. “Such a terrible girl.”

  Willie said, “Terrible,” and thought of Marsha’s tearstricken face and her white rabbit coat and her money and remembered how her head felt against his shoulder and the sly look she gave him, as if she were reading the future in his face.

  One morning Willie observed that his mother was growing tired of this subject, and he feared that unless he mentioned Marsha first, they might not discuss her at all, and he would lose the pleasure of parading Marsha’s faults, a pleasure oddly akin to prayer, for it seemed to bring him into the very presence of her to whom all this talk and energy were directed. A new morsel of information would sustain his appetite for weeks.

  “Her stepfather is Dr. Deller,” said Wanda. “Did you know that? Don’t forget to drink your orange juice.”