Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  How many of them do you want?

  (I am sending the English words so that you can see how the song is not so pretty.)

  Remember that, in the end, it is only a song about a pig. Perhaps when you sing it, you will think of me, just as I am thinking of you.

  Love,

  Émile

  FORTY-ONE

  By December, the Soviet Union had invaded Germany. United States troops had landed in the Philippines. German field marshal Erwin Rommel, who they said was in on the plot to kill Hitler, had committed suicide. And the French had captured Strasbourg, the city near the Vosges Mountains, where we stole the Heinkel He 70.

  On December 5, the BBC news reported that all German women over the age of eighteen were being asked to volunteer for the army and the air force as test pilots. They were needed by the Luftwaffe for jobs like ferrying planes so that they could free men for service at the front.

  On Friday, December 15, Captain Glenn Miller flew out of RAF Twinwood Farm in Clapham, Bedfordshire, 150 miles northwest of Manston, in a single-engine UC-64 Norseman. Captain Miller was traveling to Paris to start a tour of Europe with his Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band. He was going ahead of the band to make arrangements, but somewhere over the English Channel, the Norseman disappeared and everyone on board went missing.

  The weather report for that day was “Hard frost with local fog in the morning.” We didn’t see the sun again that whole week. Every day was damp and overcast, with a bitter, cold rain and a thick mist that rolled in off the water. I was beginning to hate England. I hated the dull and the damp and the dreariness. I hated the boiled potatoes at breakfast, lunch, and supper. I hated sitting there while the war was still going on. I wasn’t in it and I wasn’t home. I was somewhere in between, and all I wanted to do was something. But the main thing I wanted was to get Johnny Clay out of the hospital and back to himself again.

  Dr. McTeer said my brother wouldn’t be able to travel for a month or two, maybe more, and as much as he wanted to, he wouldn’t be allowed to rejoin the fight.

  For you, the war is over.

  He would recover, but it was going slower than he wanted. One week after he woke up, an official-looking man flew in from Harrington and said he was with the OSS. For three days, he locked himself away with my brother and debriefed him. When he was finished, the man told me they had to do this with all the special agents. They had to deactivate them like time bombs because they found that most of these men, especially the American ones, were like a law unto themselves when they came home.

  When I saw Johnny Clay after his deactivation, he seemed both tired and angry. He’d exchanged all the French francs he had and they added up to five hundred dollars. He sealed most of this into an envelope and made me mail it home to Daddy Hoyt. Then he took the rest of the money, nearly ten dollars, and spent it on scotch. I never found out who smuggled it in to him—one of the officers, one of the nurses who was sweet on him—but he drank for four whole days and then stopped. When I asked him about it, he said, “I figured I drank enough, Velva Jean. Now I got to get myself better so I can get out of here.”

  He could walk now and eat, but he got worn out quicker than Aunt Bird, who was at least eighty years old. He had to stop and rest his hand on my shoulder, the whole while pretending he was just trying to decide which way to walk or that he was studying a painting on the wall, when I knew he was only trying to catch his breath.

  There was a lot he was mad about these days. He was mad because he wasn’t well yet. He was mad because he was missing half his middle finger, right down to the second knuckle, and he said how was he ever supposed to play guitar or pan for gold again. He was mad because “everyone is fighting this war but me.” He was mad that he didn’t remember stealing the plane and flying out of Germany. He said he would have shot those Germans down if only he’d been conscious. Missing finger or not, he would have shot every last one.

  I tried to take his mind off things by telling him about Gossie and Paris and Hugo Bleicher and prison and Helen and the song we’d used as a signal so we would each know the other was okay. I told him about the song I was writing now, the first one since I’d left America. I was almost finished with it.

  He said, “Is it good?”

  “It’s taking the most out of me. I’ve never had so much trouble writing a song before. The way I wrote it is Mama singing to me and me singing to Mama, a kind of back and forth.”

  “But is it good?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I guess.”

  “You used to know.”

  That’s true, I thought. I used to know a lot of things.

  I said, “I met a woman in the war who talked about how important it is at times like this for art to survive. She said if stories and beauty can make it through the war, that means life can be created from them again.”

  He seemed to think this over. He said, “Maybe that’s one reason it’s so hard for you to write. Because you got a lot to get through. There’s a lot riding on this song. But that makes it even more important to write it, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “We got to be men about it, Velva Jean.” His voice caught and he said he was tired then and would I mind letting him rest. Before I left I told him, “Just think of the limp you’re going to have, Johnny Clay. And just think of the stories you’ll tell.”

  The next day, when we walked down the hall outside his room, he made sure not to lean on me at all. Whenever a nurse walked by, he played up that limp like he was Hopalong Cassidy.

  On Friday, December 22, after breakfast, I trudged through the winter chill and mist to the hospital. Twenty planes had made emergency landings since I’d landed there, and the hospital beds were always full of the wounded. Now that he was out of danger, Johnny Clay shared a room with nineteen other men, ten beds in a line on either side.

  Sometimes I would find him playing cards with one of the other soldiers, and sometimes he would be lying flat on his back, staring into space. I dreaded those days because there was no cheering him. He didn’t want to hear any war news or talk about anything much other than the weather or what I’d had to eat at the mess hall. His mind would drift off somewhere and I worried that not all of him had come back from wherever it was he’d been when he was asleep. I wondered if he was in two places, because sometimes that was how it seemed.

  When I walked into Johnny Clay’s room the morning of the twenty-second, there was a girl sitting in the chair beside his bed, her legs crossed. She was dark and slim, and I thought, What is Eleanor doing here?

  Johnny Clay looked past her and said, “Well hey there, Velva Jean. You should see your face.” He grinned at me, and the first thing I thought was, Thank goodness it’s going to be a good day.

  The girl turned and it wasn’t Eleanor at all. She was wearing a WASP uniform—the Santiago Blues—and for the first time in a long time I thought about how I didn’t have a uniform anymore and how Perry had promised to get me a new one.

  She said, “Hartsie.” And then she flew to me and wrapped her arms around me and hugged me for a good minute.

  “Helen and I’ve been talking,” Johnny Clay said. His eyes were shining and I thought, Oh no. But I was happy because he was happy and looking like his old self.

  Helen said, “He’s been talking, mostly.” She didn’t sound very impressed, and I thought, Now that’s a first. Usually girls went mad for Johnny Clay.

  I pulled a chair up next to Helen’s and we sat side by side, close to Johnny Clay’s bed. She picked up a bag—my bag from Harrington, the one I’d left behind with all the things I owned in the world—and said, “I thought you might want this.”

  Then she crossed her legs again and took my hand and held it tight and told us about where she’d been—how she’d crashed in France near Falaise and how members of the Resistance had helped her get to Paris and the Freedom Line. She traveled for days on trains and bicycles and als
o on foot with one French guide after another and two male pilots, until she crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain. From there, she flew back to England, back to Harrington, and ever since she’d been ferrying planes from base to base for the RAF, just like she was back at Camp Davis.

  Johnny Clay said she was one of the bravest girls he’d ever met, and to be so beautiful too. Helen stared at him as if she didn’t understand a single thing he was saying to her. I wondered what on earth she made of my brother.

  I said, “I guess we’ll be back at Camp Davis before too long.” The thought of it made my stomach sink, but there was something comforting about it too.

  She squeezed my hand. “No, Hartsie. When I found out you were here, I wanted to come myself to let you know.”

  “Let me know what?”

  “The WASP were disbanded. It’s official. Jackie Cochran sent a telegram.”

  She unfolded something from her pocket and held it out to me. I took it from her, but I didn’t read it.

  Helen said, “No honors, no ceremony. We’re just supposed to pack up our flight suits and our parachutes and go home.”

  I looked down at the paper and the words were blurred. I thought: Well. You are really and truly on your own now. I wasn’t a part of the military even though I’d flown their planes. I wasn’t really a spy, even if I had worked with the Resistance and helped rescue a double agent for the SOE, because I wasn’t an actual member of the OSS. And now I wasn’t a WASP anymore. I wasn’t Clementine Roux and I was barely Velva Jean Hart, that girl who dreamed of the Opry and a suit made of rhinestones, who used to save every penny she earned just so she could sing there one day.

  Helen said, “What will you do, Hartsie?”

  I said, “I don’t know.” For the first time in my life, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a single thing planned. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know either.”

  I said, “What about you, Johnny Clay?”

  He said, “I don’t know, Velva Jean.” The brightness had gone out of his voice. He scowled down at himself lying on the hospital bed. You never knew when his mood was going to change these days.

  We sat staring out at the room of wounded men, some who would survive to plan a future, some who wouldn’t. Johnny Clay would make it home, but I worried that, like his left hand, maybe only part of him was making it home after all. No one said anything for a while.

  From his bed, Johnny Clay started to sing: “In the land of crimson sunsets, skies are wide and blue….”

  Helen and I looked at him.

  He said, “Isn’t that the song you were going to use to find each other if you got lost?”

  I thought: Yes, it was. Only I’m more lost now.

  He said, “Look. Once a WASP, always a WASP. I don’t care what the government says or what the military says. They can come to me if they got a problem with it. I say you girls earned your stripes as much as any man I know, maybe more so. Just as much as any of these men here. But the thing you got to remember is this—when plans change on you, you figure out something else, something better.”

  Crow Lovelorn had told me the same thing back in Nashville, when I asked him if he missed making records and singing at the Grand Ole Opry. Sometimes dreams change, either because they have to or because life has something else in mind for you.

  Johnny Clay looked down at his hand, at his leg, and then he glared up at us and said, “So go on then. Sing it to me. Those are the only two lines I know. I want you to sing me that song.”

  I was crying by then, and Helen was too—tears pouring down like the rain outside the windows.

  Helen said she would stay through Christmas Eve, and then she was due back at Harrington. When she asked me to come with her, I said no. I was done with the war for now. Besides, I needed to stay with Johnny Clay.

  That night, after she went to sleep, I sat on my bunk and opened the bag she’d brought me. I laid everything out on the bed and thought: There is your life, Velva Jean. That’s who you are. It was like looking at clues to a mystery, pieces of a puzzle. A Mexican guitar. A mandolin. A navy dress with a skirt that twirled. A green emerald that shone when you rubbed it. Clover jewelry. A secret decoder ring. Bakelite hair clips. Mama’s wedding ring and Bible, where she’d noted important dates and events. Two letters from my daddy, written when Mama was sick and he was trying to get her help. A wood carving of a girl, her mouth open like she was singing. Songs and letters written to me by a boy named Ned Tyler and a boy named Butch Dawkins. A record produced by a man named Darlon C. Reynolds with two songs, one on each side. A Life magazine with me on the cover. A framed picture of the Grand Ole Opry stage. A Comet Red lipstick.

  I added in the wooden flying girl, the rip cord, the seashell, and the compass, dented by a German bullet. I added in the letter from Émile. I almost added Clementine Roux’s wedding ring, but instead I slid it onto my finger. And then, in my mind, I added in the things I didn’t have anymore—a perfume bottle that sprayed poison gas, a lipstick gun, a scarf that was really a map, and a telegram from Jacqueline Cochran, congratulating me on being the second woman in history to fly a bomber across the ocean.

  Together they didn’t add up to much, but then again, they added up to just about everything I had.

  Christmas Day was clear and bright. Frost covered the ground and the planes that lined the airfield, but the sun shone strong, a giant yellow-orange that rose up over the water.

  All of the sharp lines and angles that had sprung out on Johnny Clay were beginning to fill in, and to celebrate his progress and the sunshine, he and I ate our Christmas breakfast on the cliffs. The water was a deep blue, and the waves smacked against the beach down below. France rose up in the distance, the cliffs there as white and high as the ones we were sitting on.

  I said, “When you look over there, it’s hard to imagine all the things that happened.”

  He said, “Or that we were ever there at all.”

  Then I thought: Just over those white cliffs is Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. And to the southwest of that lives a girl with a gap between her teeth who delivers messages on a bicycle. And to the southeast of that is Paris, where Gossie and Cleo and Rose Valland and others like them, and maybe a rough and surly Frenchman going by the name of Émile Gravois, are working to win this war, not just for France but for everyone. And to the right of us, over the land, and over the ocean, is America.

  With his right hand, Johnny Clay fished something out of his pocket. Two bullets, gold and shiny. He pinched them between his fingers and raised them to the sky. He said, “I’m going to take these back home and give them to Granny along with that bookmark from Hitler. She can show them to everyone on Fair Mountain. She can keep them on her mantel.”

  I said, “You don’t really have a bookmark from Hitler.” I was daring him to show it to me, and he knew this.

  He sat blinking into the sun, and then he turned to me and winked and said, “Like hell I don’t.” I waited for him to take it out, to prove me wrong, but instead he said, “You asked me a question the other day that I was too tired to answer.”

  “What question?”

  “What am I going to do. Well, I was thinking about it, and there are lots of things—once we get back to America, I’d like to hang around New York City awhile and see what that’s about. Maybe see those Rockettes, the ones that kick their legs out all in a line. Maybe go to Grant’s Tomb. I wouldn’t mind riding the rails again and visiting the places across America that I still haven’t seen. I’d like to see Mexico. I got a wild hair to go back to Hollywood. I reckon I could be a movie star by Friday.”

  When he was done, I said, “We aren’t even home yet, Johnny Clay, and already you’re wanting to leave.” Even as I said it, I felt the old itch in me that I knew was just like my daddy’s. It was the one that told me I’d be wanting to go before too long myself because, like it or not, that was the way I was made.

  Johnny Clay said, “There’s a great b
ig world out there, Velva Jean. What we got up on Fair Mountain is only a little part of it. It’s a good part, but it’s just a little part.” For a moment his face went cloudy. He reached down, like he wasn’t even thinking about it, and rested his left hand, the one missing part of a finger, on his bad leg. He said, “Yessir. It’s a good part, but it’s just a little part.” His voice drifted away over the water.

  I reached my hand out to let him know I was there, that it was going to be okay, that we were going to be okay, but he shifted just out of reach. My ring caught the sun and held it.

  “It’s the best part,” I said.

  Johnny Clay raised his mug of tea. He was in an easy mood, but his eyes had gone serious. He said, “To home.”

  I raised my own mug and we clinked them together, the sound of it carrying away on the wind. “To home.”

  “Live Out There”

  (words and music by Velva Jean Hart)

  “Live out there,” my mama said,

  but somehow I lost track—

  lost myself, then found myself

  and now at last I’m back

  And making a new start.

  She’ll be with me all the way—

  I’m not scared ’cause I’ve got her heart—

  And I’m growing closer to her day by day—

  I’ll hold on to her memory and prayer—

  I’ll live out there.

  “Mama, don’t make me go,” I said.

  “I want to stay right here.”

  “You have to go,” she told me,

  “Don’t be afraid to live out there.”

  Lost and gone forever like last night’s moon—

  the unknown soldiers in makeshift tombs—

  They lived out there.

  Joan of Arc on the funeral pyre—

  Courage born in fear and fire—

  She lived out there.

  Beyond the crimson sunsets in a deep blue sky—

  Beyond the bright clouds where women pilots fly—

  Live out there.