by Dean Hughes
After the ceremony, the family gathered at the new Sugar House Park for a picnic. Wally went early to find a good spot, and Grandma and Grandpa Thomas came this time. So did the Stoltzes. Everyone ate fried chicken and potato salad, and then Wally got a softball game going. He talked most of the males in the family into playing, even his dad, along with Bev and LaRue, and he recruited some friends and even a few strangers, enough to have eight or ten on each side. Peter gave the sport a try and turned out to have more of a knack for it than anyone could have expected. Brother Stoltz, who stayed at the picnic table and watched, told Bea, “Peter is a fine sportsman. He missed his youth, for the most part—but he could have been an excellent soccer player. That’s what I would have enjoyed—seeing him play.”
“So many boys lost their chance to play,” Bea told him. Sometimes Bea thought she was forgetting the war, letting it go, and then the enormity of it all would strike her again.
“Yes. So many boys,” Brother Stoltz said.
The Stoltzes didn’t like the heat, and they left sooner than the others, as did Grandma and Grandpa Thomas. The game continued, but Al got out rather quickly himself, and he took Gene for a little walk, down to the swings. Eventually Bea was left at the table in the shade of a young maple tree, with Bobbi, Anna, and Lorraine. Kathy was content for the moment to play with some little toys on a blanket in the shade.
Bea liked this, having her three “daughters” around her. They laughed about the softball game going on not far away, and they talked about this and that, nothing important. Anna was worried about Gene’s wildness. “He never calms down. He can run all day. And he’s so stubborn. He won’t listen to me,” she told Bea.
“It’s the hardest thing I know of, raising kids,” Bea told her. “You know what they ought to be learning, and you want so much to teach them—but they have their own will.”
“At least you don’t have to worry about us now,” Bobbi said. “We all turned out just perfect—except for LaRue.”
Bea laughed, but then she said, “You have turned out well—better than I dared to hope sometimes. But I still worry. Things are changing so fast these days, and I wonder what kind of world these little babies are going to grow up in.”
“I worry about that too,” Lorraine said. “I see the way some of the girls at the high school are dressing now, and I wonder what Kathy is going to face in another ten or fifteen years. There’s almost no modesty left.”
Bea laughed. “I love to hear you girls start to worry about the kinds of things I used to fuss about. Bobbi always told me I was getting upset about nothing at all.”
“You were,” Bobbi said. “It’s this next generation I’m worried about.”
Everyone was smiling, but Bea said, quite seriously, “So it always is.” She picked up a paper plate—another new extravagance since the war—and used it to fan her face. She would have preferred to go on home, where the house was likely to be a little cooler, but she was willing to wait and let everyone enjoy themselves as long as they wished. “I’ll say this. You girls have brought me more joy than I ever expected to have again in this life. I feel as close to you, Anna and Lorraine, as I do to my own daughters. And you’re both so good for my sons. I watch the way you’re healing them—I see them coming back to themselves—and I wonder what might have happened to them if you hadn’t been the ones they had chosen. Not every girl would understand.”
Bea watched as Beverly took a swing at the softball and bounced it on the ground toward third base. She should have been out, but a boy Bea didn’t know muffed the ball and then made a wild throw over the first baseman’s head. Beverly’s teammates all screamed for her to run to second, but she seemed relieved just to be on base. She stood with one foot on the base—a brown paper bag held in place by a rock—and fanned herself with her hand. She was wearing a tan cotton skirt with a blue “boy’s style” shirt, and her new saddle oxfords. Bea could hardly believe how grown up she looked. In the past year she had gained so much confidence, had become so much more comfortable with herself. She was still dating Garner from time to time, but she got asked to every dance, it seemed, and by lots of different boys.
Anna was watching the game too, one hand resting on her big middle. She waited until another girl hit the ball toward second, and Beverly was forced out. As the players in the field ran back toward home, she said, “I think I do understand Alex—better now than I did last year. But he’s not doing so well as you might think. He’s still so nervous. If he could, he would just hide away from the world. I think he’s braver now than when he was in the war—just the way he makes himself keep doing what he has to do.”
“Do you think it was wise of him to accept this new calling?”
“I do. He came home, after the stake president talked to him, and he cried and cried. He kept telling me that he didn’t feel worthy. But it makes him feel better about himself to do it. And he’s doing a good job.”
Bea worried about that. It had only been a month now since he had been called to be second counselor to his bishop. It was like Alex not to turn the calling down, but she had sensed how worried he was about it. She hoped the pressure wouldn’t be too much for him.
“He’ll be all right,” Bobbi said. “I’ve seen so much change in him lately. He’s a lot more like the Alex I remember.”
“He’s better,” Bea said, and tears came into her eyes. “He’s deeper, more thoughtful. He’s paid a price, but he’s getting something from it.”
“I think so too,” Anna said. “Someday it will be worth it. But I wish everything wasn’t so hard for him right now.”
“It’s the same for Richard,” Bobbi said. “He’s doing so much better, but I can feel, every day, that it’s all such an effort for him.”
Bea knew what the girls meant, and she wished too that there weren’t always so many hard dues to pay in this life. But she heard Alex laugh, and she looked up to see that he had just hit the ball hard, knocking it way over Wally’s head. Wally was chasing after it but not running hard. In fact, he eventually slowed to a walk and let a little boy toss him the ball. Alex was already loping toward home plate, but he was looking back at Wally. He yelled something Bea couldn’t hear, and Wally laughed, then called back, “That was nothing. My little girl could hit the ball that far.” And the joy of the moment—this day—struck Bea. How could she ever have hoped to see such a thing? Everyone there; everyone healthy; everyone having fun together. She looked across the park and saw Al pushing little Gene on the swing, Gene laughing, and then she looked down at Kathy on the blanket. She thought of these little cousins growing up together, along with Anna’s next baby, soon to come: another generation. It was hard not to worry about that, about other wars, other hard times, but she told herself not to do that today. This was all too good.
Bea looked at Bobbi and Anna, across the table from her, and put her arm around Lorraine’s shoulder. “I hope you girls know how much I love you—and these little grandbabies you’ve given me.”
Anna reached across the table and patted Bea’s hand. “We’re glad they have such a good grandma.”
Bobbi had begun to smile, seeming unexplainably delighted about something. “I wasn’t going to say anything yet, but maybe this is a good time for me to make a little announcement,” she said.
Bea knew immediately. In fact, she thought she’d known for a couple of weeks.
“Richard and I weren’t going to say anything quite so soon this time—because of what happened last time. But I can’t wait. He might be upset with me, but . . . well . . . I’m expecting again.”
Bea got up and walked around the table. She sat down next to Bobbi and put her arms around her. “Oh, Bobbi, I’ve prayed so much about this. The best is just knowing for sure that you can have babies.”
“I know,” Bobbi said. “I know.”
Bea clung to her daughter for a time, and then she got out of the way so her daughters-in-law could hug Bobbi too. All Bea could think was that the Lord was be
ing good to her family. After all that had happened, all the nightmarish times she had been through, now the days seemed to bring one great blessing after another. She was still worried about Alex, concerned that Bobbi could carry this baby all right, and, mostly, fearful of what might lie ahead for LaRue. But troubles seemed to be part of life, and she had realized more than ever, these past few years, that she could never know the good of this world without experiencing some of the pain.
As the afternoon grew hotter, all the Thomases finally gathered their things together and moved the party back to the family home. Inside the house, with its good walls, and some fans going, the temperature wasn’t quite so bad. Alex was pleased that everyone came—even the Stoltzes—and that no one, not even LaRue, made an excuse to run off. He liked having everyone around. During his years away from Utah, the Twenty-Fourth of July had always been a little strange: a day most people didn’t even notice on the calendar, and yet such a big day in the memory of a kid who had grown up among the Saints in Utah.
He and Wally and Richard ended up on the front porch together. Alex sat on the front steps, in the shade of the porch. Richard took the old love seat and left room for Wally, but Wally sat on the rail by the lilac bushes. He was chomping on a big slice of watermelon, then turning his head and spitting seeds into the lilacs. “Remember how we used to see who could spit a watermelon seed the farthest?” Wally asked Alex.
“Sure,” Alex said. “But what I remember, when I think of watermelon, is that day we were up in the canyon, and our watermelon got away from us and went down the river.”
“So you remember that too? I used to think about that when I was gone,” Wally said. “Gene set up a howl, like his heart was going to break.”
“Do you remember what Dad told him?”
“Sure. He told him it was going to make a good story—and a good memory was better than a watermelon. I don’t know, though. This watermelon is awfully good.” He bit into it again.
“But Dad was right. That’s a good memory, still.”
Wally spit out some seeds, worked his tongue around a little, and then spit one more. “It is. What I wish, though, is that I could have seen Gene at least one more time. My memory has to go too far back. I can only think of him as a little kid, and he grew up so much after I was gone.”
“I saw him a little while later. But I feel the same way.”
“Wouldn’t that be something, if he could just be here today?”
But Alex didn’t want to talk about that. He had never known Gene well enough, hadn’t worked hard enough between his mission and his induction into the army to get close to him. It was one of the great regrets of his life. He never thought of the boy without feeling that he should have tried harder, should have said some things he never did. And it was that as much as anything that caused him to say, “I want to tell you guys something.” He looked away from Wally and Richard when he continued. “I thought I’d never be so close to a group of guys as I was to the ones in my squad. But these last few weeks, since we’ve all kind of opened up with each other—I’ve felt just as close to you two. And there are a lot of things I can say to you that I never could have said to them.”
“I feel the same way,” Wally said.
“Yeah, me too,” Richard said.
“You guys are saving my life,” Alex said. “You really are.”
After that they sat for a long time without talking. The sun was angling from deep in the valley now, over the Great Salt Lake, but the heat wasn’t letting up yet. It seemed stuck under the roof of the porch, with no breeze to move it. A little flock of sparrows had landed on the front sidewalk. They were setting up a clatter, but that was the only sound. Then Richard said, “There’s something I want to tell you. Bobbi and I agreed not to say anything yet, so I’ll probably get in trouble—but I guess I’ll take the chance.” Alex looked around at Richard, saw him smile, and knew before he said it. “Bobbi’s pregnant again.”
“Oh, Richard, that’s good,” Alex said, and he felt the relief. “That’s so good.”
A little memory jumped into Alex’s mind. He and Bobbi had gone for a walk one day, out in the cold, the winter before they had both left for the service. Alex had talked to Bobbi about Anna for the first time, and Bobbi was worrying about Phil, the guy she was engaged to. What struck Alex now was that both of them—he and Bobbi—had walked some long, hard roads, but they had ended up in the right places. Alex got up from the step and walked to Richard. Wally was already there, shaking Richard’s hand, slapping him on the back. Alex shook his hand too, and then he asked, “Do you mind if we go in and say something to Bobbi?”
“No. That’s fine,” Richard said. “If she’s going to chew me out, we might as well get it over with.”
So the three walked into the house. Bobbi was in the living room, talking to Heinrich and Frieda, and to Peter. Dad was there, too, but he had his nose in the paper. The Deseret News had put out a big special edition, all about the history of Utah. As Alex walked toward Bobbi, smiling, she stood up and said, “He told you, didn’t he? He wasn’t supposed to do that.”
But Alex paid no attention to that. He took Bobbi into his arms and said, “I was so worried that this couldn’t happen, Bobbi. I’m so happy for you.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s the best part.” She hugged Wally, too, and then she went to Richard. “Don’t worry. You’re not in trouble. I spilled the beans to the girls already. And I told Dad.”
Al looked up from his paper and smiled.
The Stoltzes now took their turn, shaking hands with Bobbi, congratulating her, and then Bea and Lorraine, LaRue and Beverly appeared from the kitchen. “Oh, that’s old news now,” LaRue said. “Bobbi told me and Bev an hour ago.”
But Alex watched his mother. She walked over to Dad and looked down, and the two exchanged a little glance. “All this is what we’ve been waiting for,” Alex heard his mom whisper.
Everyone was standing now, seeming unsure what to do. But after a moment, Heinrich said, “We have some news in our family, too. This might be a good time to tell you.” He turned to Peter, who was standing off a little from the rest, near the couch where he had been sitting. “Peter, do you want to tell them?”
He nodded and said, “Yes. I’m going back soon to Germany.”
“Really? Why?” Al asked.
Peter seemed to struggle for the right words. Finally, he said, simply, “It seems the best for me.”
“But won’t you miss your family?”
“Yes, I will. Certainly.”
Everyone was quiet. A sort of circle had formed in the living room, and now no one moved. Alex knew that his family had heard this as bad news, and no one knew what to say.
“I want to build . . .” Peter began, but than he stopped and admitted, “I don’t know how to say this in English.”
Anna spoke for him. “He feels that he needs to help rebuild Germany, not leave it behind.”
“Can you get work over there?” Al asked.
“Some kind of work. Yes.”
“But what about college? You and I spoke about your going to college here. You’ll never have that chance there, will you?”
“No. Probably not.”
Brother Stoltz put his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “We’ve talked about all those things,” he said. “But love has something to do with all this too.”
Alex saw Peter blush. “I write to a girl I know,” he said. “But I don’t know what happens to us now. That’s not the only reason I go.”
Alex knew it was a very big reason, and he understood. He also understood Peter’s love of Germany, the desire to be there and help the people. He had suspected that Peter would decide to do this sooner or later. Alex stepped to Peter and put his arm around his shoulders. “I’m glad someone in our family will be there,” he said. “Mom and I have been trying to send help, and it hasn’t been easy. You can do something about that.”
“Yes. I talked to Sister Thomas about this already.
”
Bea nodded.
“Couldn’t you bring your girl over here?” Al asked.
“Maybe,” Peter said. “But in Germany I have my language, and I want Germany to be . . . a good place again. Maybe you understand that.”
“I do,” LaRue said. “Are you leaving before me?” She dropped onto the couch. “Hey, sit down everyone. You look like statues.”
“Yes. I think I leave first. Maybe in a month.”
“Yup. That’s before me. I won’t be leaving until September.”
Some people did begin to sit down, but Bea was still standing next to Al’s chair. “LaRue, don’t say it like that,” she said. “You sound like you can’t wait.”
“Well, I am pretty excited about it. Who wouldn’t want to get out of here?” But her voice didn’t sound as arrogant as her words. Alex had talked to her quite a lot lately, and he knew she did have mixed feelings about the enormous change coming in her life.
“Aren’t you scared at all?” Bobbi asked.
Alex could see that LaRue loved having the spotlight to herself. She always had. But she answered honestly. “I don’t think it’s real to me yet. When I try to really imagine getting on the train, then I feel kind of scared.”
“I can promise you,” Bobbi said, “you’ll be a lot more scared when the day comes.”
