by Dean Hughes
He thought of Bobbi, remembering one spring afternoon when he had walked home from junior high and found her there on the porch, sitting on the top step, reading a book. “What are you doing out here?” he had asked her, because the air was still quite cool, but she had said, “It’s too nice to go in.” That was all—just a strange little memory, but he could remember her saddle shoes and her ankle socks, her plaid skirt, and her face—her freckles and the way she rolled her eyes up and off to one side as she smiled. She had been a little harsh with him now and again, back then, but he had never feared her, never tried hard to please her—not the way he had done with Alex.
Wally stopped across the street, stood under the Archibalds’ chestnut tree and looked for a time. He had imagined this moment over and over, and now it was finally going to happen: he was going to step in through that front door, and life would begin again. He didn’t want to hurry one part of the experience. He looked at the lilac bushes out front, the love seat on the porch, the old black screen door . . . and then he saw the stars in the front window. On a field of white cloth were four stars: three blue, one gold. And, of course, that was the change, that gold star. This was not perfect, not entirely the return he had imagined all these years, and Wally realized why he had felt as much sadness as joy as he had walked through the old neighborhood. Gene had almost always been with him in these streets, tagging him, imitating him, granting him the deference a little boy gives his big brother.
Wally was still standing on the sidewalk when he heard voices—two people talking somewhere nearby. He didn’t want to see anyone yet, so he walked on across the street, but he slowed again as he reached the sidewalk. He approached the house hesitantly, prolonging his steps, still taking everything in, and then he climbed the three steps to his front porch. He wondered who was home, how this would all happen, but he knew he didn’t want to knock. So he set his duffel bag on the porch, pulled the screen door open, and turned the big brass doorknob. The door seemed to resist a little and then came open with a bit of a scraping sound—the way it always had. He stepped inside, where all was quiet, pushed the door shut, and then stood and looked at it all. The light filtered through the lacy curtains on the front window, and the stained glass in
the upper window panes cast red and gold across the carpet. Everything inside the living room, just off the entrance, had been left the same: the old gray couch, the Philco radio next to Dad’s chair, even the knickknack shelf in the corner, with the ceramic kittens. Wally knew this was a kindness, was sure that the room had been kept that way for him, and he was touched. He looked up the stairs, thought of his old room, felt it all, smelled the flavor of home. He thought of days after school, running in, shouting, “Hey, Mom, I’m home,” of lying on the carpet with a new train set on Christmas morning, of all the family meetings. He stepped into the living room and looked toward the dining room: the big maple table that had always been stretched out long, with all the extra leaves, for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with the family. Off the dining room, in the kitchen, he could hear someone moving about, heard a pan touch the stove and make a tiny scraping noise on a burner. How could it all be so familiar, so reliable, so unchanging?
“Who’s home?” someone called. Mom.
Wally wasn’t sure how to do this, so he took a breath, and then he said, his voice soft in the quiet house, “It’s just Wally.”
Footsteps moved across the kitchen floor, and then the door swung open, and there was Mom, a little in the shadows, the light from the front windows barely reaching her. Her hair was grayer, her shape a little stouter—that much he could see—but everything else was the same. She was wearing an apron over a house dress, gray in the shadows. She stood fixed, as though shocked, but her hand came up, clapped across her mouth.
Wally didn’t hurry to her. He walked slowly, enjoying every second of this time, and then he took her in his arms. “Hi, Mom,” he said, but that was all he could get out before he began to cry.
Wally clung to his mother, felt her shake with sobs, and then he heard footsteps on the stairs, someone coming down. He stepped back enough to turn, and just then a girl stepped into the living room, still at a distance from him. He knew that this had to be Beverly, and yet it couldn’t be. It was someone else.
She stood still for a moment, looking curious, not excited, and then the realization struck her and she shrieked, “Wally!” She ran a couple of steps and then jumped at him, threw her arms around him, knocked him backward. Wally still had hold of his mother with one arm; he wrapped the other one around Beverly, and the three held onto each other. “I can’t believe it,” Beverly squealed. “I can’t believe it.”
The sound of Beverly’s little scream had apparently reached upstairs. Wally heard steps again, this time harder, quicker, and he heard a shout: “Is it Wally? Is Wally here?”
This was LaRue, of course, but she had turned the corner now, and she was so grown up and beautiful. Wally had tried to imagine what his sisters would look like, but he had never gotten the old image out of his head: two little girls in red velvet dresses.
Mom and Beverly both stepped aside enough to let LaRue get through, but they all ended up in a cluster, clasping each other, all crying, and still Wally hadn’t said anything. The reality of all this was almost frightening. He had pictured seeing them, being home, but he hadn’t thought of what to do after that. He didn’t know where to start, how to tell them all the things he wanted to say.
Finally everyone stepped back, and Mom said, “How did you get here? Why didn’t you let us know?”
But it was too prosaic a thing to talk about first, and Wally couldn’t get himself to answer. “I can’t believe I’m here,” he said. “It’s all the same. Everything has been here all that time I was gone—just the way I pictured it.” He took his mother back into his arms, bent to hold her tight, and he couldn’t stop crying.
“Dad wouldn’t let us change the house,” LaRue said. “That’s why it looks so worn out. I keep telling him, ‘Let Wally get one good look, and then throw all that old stuff out.’”
Wally looked over his mother’s shoulder, and he laughed. “LaRue, you look like a woman,” he said. “I can’t get used to you. And look at Beverly.” He stepped from his mom and took the girls into his arms again. “It’s too good to be true,” he whispered. “I just can’t believe I’m here.”
“Five years, Wally,” Mom said. “It’s been five years.”
“Wally, you don’t look so awful as everyone said you would,” LaRue told him.
“LaRue!” Beverly said. “He looks great! Really great.”
Wally knew he did look more like himself than he had expected he would. He had filled out considerably more during his four weeks in San Francisco, and the color had come back to his skin.
“Come into the kitchen, Wally,” Mom said. “Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know. Probably. I haven’t thought about it.”
They all walked into the kitchen, and Wally looked around again. He saw the same wallpaper with the little yellow flowers; the same old white oven with the black handle; the same linoleum on the floor, if a little more worn. But it was the smell he remembered best, loved the most. He caught a whiff from the gas stove, but there was also the good aroma of bread—yeast—and something meaty, like simmering gravy—not cooking now but lingering in the air. “I was just starting supper,” Mom said. “I’ll call your dad. He can be home in ten minutes.”
“No. Don’t do that. Let me just talk to you three for now. I don’t want to do this all at once.”
Bea raised her apron and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’ve been trying to think what to say to you, what to do for you when you got here, but it just hasn’t seemed real until now.”
“Let’s make him a good supper. That’s the first thing,” Beverly said.
Wally kept watching Beverly and LaRue. He wanted to get them into his head, accept who they were now, but i
t bothered him that they seemed such strangers. “Why don’t we all just sit down,” Wally said. “I’m not hungry yet. Really.”
“Well, all right, but let me get some potatoes boiling. I was about to do that when you came in.”
She walked to the sink. A half-peeled potato lay on the cabinet by the sink, next to a paring knife. She picked them both up, but she didn’t start to peel. She watched Wally as he sat down at the kitchen table. He could see how much it meant to her, just to see him there.
Beverly moved in next to Wally, slid her chair up close. LaRue sat down opposite him. “You can’t believe how much we’ve talked about you during the war,” LaRue said. “Bev would ask me a thousand times, ‘Do you think Wally is all right? Where do you think he is?’ Everything like that. And Mom would always tell us, ‘He’s alive. I know he is.’”
“Is that what you thought, Mom?” Wally asked.
She was still holding the potato and the knife, still not peeling. “I did. We only got word about you that one time, but I did believe you would make it back—most of the time, anyway.”
“There were lots of times I didn’t know whether I would make it,” Wally said. “Lots of times.”
“Was it really awful, Wally?” LaRue asked. “Did the Japs treat you really bad?”
“Sure. It was bad,” Wally said, but he didn’t want to say any more than that.
“Why did so many of the men die?” LaRue asked. “Did they starve you?”
“Well . . . they didn’t feed us much. A lot of guys got sick, too, and we didn’t have much in the way of medical help.”
“What did they get sick from?”
Wally looked at LaRue, wondered how he could give her some concept of what it had been like. What did she know of beriberi or typhoid fever? How could she imagine the degradation and filth he had lived with? And why should she? “The guys just caught different kinds of bugs,” he said. “There’s lots of stuff to catch in the Philippines—especially if you aren’t eating right.” But he could see more questions coming, so he asked one of his own: “What’s happening at old East High these days?”
“The football team isn’t so hot this year,” Beverly said. “But at least we can have more dances now. During the war we couldn’t have nice decorations or even punch and cookies and stuff like that—because of the sugar.”
“We still can’t get much sugar,” Mom said. “But they have taken the ration off meat and fat.”
Wally nodded. He kept trying to get a feel for what life had been like, but it was hard for him to think that anything had actually changed. “I’ll have to go to a football game one of these days. That sounds like fun to me.”
“If you go, they’ll probably have you stand up and wave to the crowd. They’ll announce that you played football for East and that you’re a war hero and everything.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Wally said. “When Chuck Adair gets back, they ought to do that for him, though. He was a star player—and he was a hero. He kept me going a lot of times.”
“When will he be home?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know. They said he hasn’t gained enough weight yet. I think they might send him to another hospital somewhere. He was really disappointed when they let me go and kept him in San Francisco.”
“I saw his mother the other day,” Mom said. “She said he sounded awfully nervous when she talked to him on the phone.”
“Yeah, he is. There’s a lot to get used to all at once.”
“You aren’t nervous,” Beverly said.
“Well . . . every guy handles things a little different,” Wally said, but he knew that he wasn’t as calm as he might seem to them. Once he feasted on these first pleasures, he knew that lots of decisions were waiting.
“I saw Lorraine’s mother at the grocery store,” Mom said. “I guess Lorraine is quitting up at Boeing and coming back to Salt Lake.”
“When is she getting married?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
Wally nodded, tried not to show any reaction, but he could feel his mom and sisters watching him. What he wondered was why Lorraine was coming home. Was it to get ready for the wedding? He wanted to see her if he could, just to talk to her, but he thought maybe that wasn’t actually a wise thing to do. “I can’t believe we’re sitting here talking like I never left home,” Wally said. “I keep thinking that I ought to be more excited.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Mom said. She had finally started peeling. “But I like that. I like how comfortable it feels to have you here.”
“You don’t seem the same to me,” Beverly said.
“Really? How have I changed?”
“You’re nicer, I guess.”
Wally laughed, and then he slid his arm around her, pulled her close to him. “I did tease you girls a lot,” he said. “I’ll start doing that again—tomorrow—so you’ll know it’s me.”
“No, you won’t,” LaRue said. “You’re older. You seem more like a man to me now—not so crazy as you always were before.”
“I’ll tell you what you are,” Mom said. “You’re good. That’s what I feel from you. I noticed it on the phone. You’re a deeper man now, more in tune with the Spirit. You seem humble to me.”
“Well, I hope so.”
“Do you feel changed?” LaRue asked.
“I guess I do. I know that in San Francisco I got myself a Book of Mormon, and it was the greatest thing in the world to have one again. I read it all the way through in a few days, and then I started over. I read a lot of the New Testament, too,
and it was like I was thirsty to get more.” He grinned. “As you may remember, that was not exactly my attitude when I left this house.”
“So maybe being a POW was a good thing for you,” Beverly said.
“Well . . . yeah. In a way.” But that was something Wally knew he would never believe. He was happy for some of the results, perhaps, but he could never pass the experience off as something to be thankful for. He just hoped that the bitterness he had known for so long would never come back to ruin his life.
“It wasn’t a good thing, Bev,” Mom said. “But Wally is taking something terrible and turning it into something good. That’s to his great credit.”
“I’m just glad it’s over,” Wally said. “Reality may not be quite as good as the dreams I used to have of being here. But it’s darn close.” He looked around the kitchen again, hugged Beverly a little tighter, tried to fill himself up with all the memories of this room: breakfasts at this table, cinnamon rolls with Mom after school, jigsaw puzzles with Bobbi and Alex when he was the little brother. “I hope you three know how much I love you,” he said in a soft voice. “How much I kept loving you all the while I was gone. There were times when I thought I might die, just from not seeing all of you, just from being so far from home.”
“Oh, Wally,” Mom said, and she walked back to him, bent and kissed his cheek and then held her face next to his. “This is all better than I even dared to hope. I longed to have you back, but I was always afraid. I thought you might come home angry, or broken. I hardly dared to think that you would be a better man than ever.”
Wally stood and took his mother into his arms once again. And life did seem as good as his dream. He couldn’t imagine that he would ever be happier.
He was still hugging his mother when he heard the front door open. “Dad’s home,” Beverly said.
Wally was surprised by the twinge of fear he felt. He wanted to see his dad, but he also felt that this was the moment when he had to account for himself. His dad had always asked plenty of him, and that no longer bothered Wally, but he didn’t want to be a disappointment.
Wally turned toward the kitchen door. By then he heard his dad call, “Bea, I’m home.”
Wally pushed the kitchen door open, stepped into the dark dining room. Dad had turned the light on in the entry. As he walked into the living room and turned, Wally could see his face. “It’s me, Dad. Wally.”
&
nbsp; Wally saw his father stop, take in air. He nodded. “I saw your duffel bag,” was all he said.
The two stepped toward each other, and Dad was the first to spread his arms wide. He took Wally in. Wally remembered the Old Spice smell of him, felt the wool of his suit coat, remembered that too. “Oh, Son,” he said, and he began to cry—audibly.
“I took the bus up here. I just wanted to walk in.”
“Sure. I understand.”
Wally took a long breath and then he said it. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too, Son. Welcome home.”
But now what? Wally stepped back. He had things he wanted to say, but he couldn’t think of them now. “I’ve been here a little while. I’ve been talking to Mom and the girls. If you have a minute, I’d like to talk to you alone.”
“Sure.”
“Could we go into your office?”
Dad laughed, and both of them knew why. So many times Dad had called Wally there, and it had always been Dad who had wanted to “talk.”
Wally turned and saw that his mother was standing in the kitchen door, the girls right behind her. “You two go ahead,” she said. “We’ll finish getting supper ready.”
Dad led the way, stepped into his office, and flipped on the light. He was wearing a navy blue suit, almost black, with a blue tie, only slightly lighter. It was all the usual uniform, but Dad looked older, a little heavier, and somehow different in a way that Wally couldn’t put his finger on. Some harshness in his face seemed gone. Either that or it had never been there, except in Wally’s mind.
“So what’s it going to be like not to be stake president?” Dad had told him on the phone that his release was coming up soon.
“Life should be a lot easier,” Dad said, but he didn’t sound convincing. He had pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket, and he was wiping his eyes, his cheeks.
“I’ll bet you’ll miss it.”
“In some ways, sure.”
“You’ve been a great stake president, Dad. Everyone in Sugar House loves you. You’ll always have that to hold onto.”
