Home Front Girls

by Suzanne Hayes

  “Rita tells me that the boys left behind are broken, somehow. I suppose he feels like he’s not doing his patriotic duty.”

  Robert scratched his head, and Corrine gave him kisses on his cheek. One kiss, laughter, another kiss, more laughter. How she loves her daddy.

  “He IS doing an honorable thing, though. Don’t you think, Glory?”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s helping me fight with the peace of knowing you and the kids are in good hands.”

  Oh, Rita. What have I done? And why, when Levi left without a word to me, did I want to cry?

  Soon Robert will ship out overseas. Soon the garden will be covered in frost. And soon I’ll be strong enough to leave Corrine with Marie and spend my days at the hospital with Robbie. He’s frightened of the dark and those nurses are always switching off the lights. It makes me want to clobber them. Knock their crisp white hats off their tidy pinned hair.

  I’ve missed your stories. Write soon.

  Love, and many thanks for sharing some sorely needed sense,

  Glory

  P.S. You know the best thing about Robert being home? The little things... Coffee in the morning, hearing him sing in the shower, the way his skin always smells like soap. I know this sounds treasonous, but I wish we could all run away to Switzerland.

  September 12, 1943

  IOWA CITY, IOWA

  Dearest Glory,

  Please stop thinking your actions had anything to do with Robbie’s illness.

  There is nothing more unavoidable or more damaging than a mother’s guilt. This I know perhaps better than most, though I was never meant to be a mother.

  Back in grammar school, I fell from a tire swing and landed hard, fracturing some necessary bones in my small pelvis. I can barely remember the pain, but I can clearly recall the doctor telling my father, in hushed tones over my sickbed, that I was ruined.

  I’d never heard my father cry before, but he did, either for me or the grandsons he surely thought would someday come. My mother soothed him, saying, “Wait and see. Wait and see,” over and over until even I was able to sleep, to dream, to heal.

  For months I walked with crutches and drank half a cup of wine before bed to thin my blood. I rested when I could and ate so much cheese I got a little plump. Eventually the bones fused back together and I tossed my crutches into the fire.

  We never talked about it. When I first saw spots of blood on my underthings Mother hugged me tight and said it was God’s sign I could have a baby. Even at thirteen I knew she was simply wishing for it to be true. Still, I decided I would take her word.

  I never told Sal. It shames me to write this. We married, moved into his parents’ building on Chicago’s west side and tried for a baby. Nothing happened. After a year Sal cupped my chin and said, “Maybe it’ll be just you and me, kiddo. And that’s fine in my book.” I cried through the night with Sal holding my face, kissing away each tear.

  When I skipped my time, I figured I was coming down with something. A few weeks later Mama Vincenzo caught my eye at Sunday dinner, smiling her cryptic Mona Lisa smile. She pulled me aside after dessert and asked when the bambino was coming.

  The realization sent a tremor through my body, head to toe. Mama V held my hand and told me not to worry, assuming my distress came from fear. But it was joy, Glory. Pure delight.

  I couldn’t wait for the baby to come. Toward the end I showed up at the hospital where Sal worked every time I got a twinge. The nurses started teasing Sal about it, calling him “Mr. False Alarm,” which is why I waited so long when I finally did go into labor.

  Mrs. Vincenzo delivered Toby on our kitchen table. “It will be quick,” she said. “Ten minutes.” And it was. By most standards I had an easy birth. But my pelvic bones—the ones my mother lovingly guided to health so many years before—cracked along those old fault lines.

  The pain...it was like a couple of wild dogs tearing at each hip. Mrs. Vincenzo put the baby to my bosom, but I could only stare at a crack in the wall, a fixed point to hypnotize myself into oblivion. Sal whispered loving words in my ear, telling me how beautiful I was and how perfect the baby looked, but I could barely breathe, let alone talk.

  Mrs. Vincenzo said I just needed rest, and Sal agreed with her until three days passed and I still could not get out of bed.

  He sent word to a doctor friend at Cook County, who showed up after his shift. I blacked out during the exam. When I came to, Sal knelt at my bed, saying over and over, “What’s wrong with us that we didn’t notice?” He never once said, “What’s wrong with you that you didn’t say anything?”

  I withdrew from everyone, even Toby. Mrs. Vincenzo said all women had “the darkness” after childbirth, to varying degrees, and since I’d broken my bones I needed extra time. But my darkness came from guilt—I felt like all the things I’d kept from Sal had weakened my insides, each lie causing a small fracture. All my goodness came out with the baby, and my body, with nothing to stabilize it, shattered.

  Sal brought Toby to me for feedings, carefully drawing my breast to the baby’s small mouth. He changed him and cleaned his pink body. He sang operettas and patted his tushy with powder. Sal mothered.

  Eventually Sal had to return to the hospital, and Toby failed to thrive. His skin took on a yellow hue and he lost interest in nursing.

  On the day he refused my breast entirely, Mrs. Vincenzo came into my room with a bottle of sugar water and a pair of crutches. She pushed me to sitting, grabbed one foot and planted it on the floor, then the other, and shoved the bottle in my hand.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “He’s dying,” she said.

  Then she brought her round face right up to mine, looked me in the eye and whispered, “Whatever it is, he’ll understand. Don’t you know that?”

  I did. Sal would understand. Why didn’t I trust his love for me? I was punishing my child for my own stubbornness, my despicable insecurity.

  I stared into Mrs. Vincenzo’s deep brown eyes for a few seconds. And then I shoved those crutches under my arms and started mothering my son.

  But I continued to let fear guide my actions. I never told Sal.

  One day, while he was eating breakfast, I blurted, “I’m sorry I failed you and Toby.”

  He left his oatmeal on the table and came to my side. “You’ve never failed us,” he assured me. “And you never will.”

  He was wrong.

  When Toby was seven he ran around with a pack of boys from the block. They were a little mean and a lot rough, and Toby was neither. I always watched from the back porch, pretending to knit while I kept an eye on their shenanigans.

  One evening the Mirro Cooking Class came on the radio, and I got caught up listening to a recipe for roast duck. I didn’t hear Toby scream. I didn’t hear anything until little Giuseppe from across the hall came running into the kitchen shouting, “Signora! Vieni! Vieni!”

  They’d been playing cowboys and Indians. Chief Toby was tied to a tree, the rope snaking around his neck pulled over a high branch. His feet swung a few inches above the ground and the blood had already drained from his lips. My negligence had brought him to death’s door again.

  I lifted him and yanked on the rope until the knot loosened. I gave him my breath and rubbed his limbs. He came to.

  After church the following Sunday, Mrs. Vincenzo said she wanted to take Toby and me out. I assumed for lunch, but instead she walked us over to her sister’s apartment.

  Zia Gialina was the neighborhood medium, or quack, depending on how you looked at life. Zia led me and a wide-eyed Toby into her back bedroom, where a bloodred velvet coverlet lay across the largest bed I’d ever seen. She sat on a mountain of embroidered pillows and motioned for us to join her.

  “My sister says there’s been trouble,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Give me yo
ur hand.”

  I held it out to her, palm up.

  She studied my lines, seemed unimpressed with what she saw and gave me back my hand. “Now the boy,” she demanded.

  I didn’t want her to scrutinize Toby’s palm. But he straightened his skinny back and stretched out his arm.

  She ran her sausage-thick fingers over his smooth palm for a very long time. “I see what it is,” she finally said. “His soul is crowded.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  Zia must have been used to resistance. Instead of addressing my lack of respect she called Mrs. Vincenzo in for a conference in Italian. When they finished, Mrs. Vincenzo said, “He needs open spaces or the black cloud will come back. You need to move.”

  I was forming a smart retort when I saw the tears in her eyes. Toby was one of her greatest loves. She must have really believed Zia if she was considering sending us away.

  And since she believed it so strongly, I believed it.

  “We need to convince Sal to take that job,” she said.

  Sal had been offered a position at the University of Iowa by an old college friend. It was a standard research/teaching position, nothing special, so Sal planned on keeping his lab job at Cook County.

  I told Sal what his aunt said, and about my worries. He didn’t laugh at Zia Gialina’s reading. “Do you want to move?” he asked. I nodded. He went to bed to sleep on it.

  The next day Sal called his friend and accepted the position. We took a house on a quiet street in Iowa City, not far from the Pharmacy Building.

  Sal flourished. His lab work satisfied him and his classes were popular, filling up before the terms began.

  Mostly I was happy, but a small part of me—the mothering part—failed to thrive properly. I grew so worried for Toby’s safety I kept him too close. He did the normal childhood things, but always with the veil of my protectiveness thrown over his head. Zia Gialina worried our crowded Chicago block was impinging on Toby’s soul, but it was me. My fears kept him fenced in.

  But push hard and your kid will push back harder. At first Toby ran toward the open spaces in his head, gobbling up books about the solar system, New York skyscrapers, the mountains of Africa.

  Later he ran toward the wide-open Pacific Ocean.

  But I fear Toby has made a mistake. He’s on a ship, packed close as a sardine. I worry his soul is being smothered....

  Oh, Glory, I’m sorry. Here I am rambling like a drunk. I’ve turned this into a letter about me. It’s not right to attach my shame and regret to you. It’s horrid to assume that my response will be your response, that Robbie’s illness will cause you to—

  [Letter never sent—stuffed in a drawer.]

  September 13, 1943

  IOWA CITY, IOWA

  Dearest Glory,

  I’ve been thinking of little Robbie every morning, and of you and Corrine and your husband. I don’t know what use my thoughts are, but each one carries with it a wish for healing, and for happiness.

  I also asked Father Denneny to call your name with the weekly intentions. I’m not sure what kind of pull he has, but there are a hundred tea-stained elderly ladies on their knees come Sunday, every one of them desperate for more reasons to beat their breasts and cry out to Our Lord. You’d think they’d have enough reasons these days....

  I wish there was something more I could do for you. I suppose the only thing I can offer is more advice: don’t blame yourself, hon. There are some people who believe everything happens by chance, and others who think every outcome was set into motion long ago. I think it’s a little bit of both. The fever befalling your family swept like a tornado through your corner of the world and caught the Whitehalls on a whim. The changes happening to you before it came through? Well, I believe those took up residence years ago, and were only just making themselves known. They’re not likely to leave anytime soon, either. They might go into hiding, but they’re there, and you’ll need to face them straight on.

  But I didn’t write this letter to upset you. If I was really a good friend, I’d be offering a distraction, so here goes.

  News on the Iowa front: Sal’s and Toby’s letters aren’t coming regularly, but they are coming. Sal hasn’t said where he is, but I have a feeling he was with the surge of troops into Italy. How strange that must have been for him. His parents were born there, and a good chunk of his family still lives in the Tuscan hills. It would be his first trip to the country where his parents met and married, where his grandparents and their parents farmed the land he is now overtaking. Would he look into a pair of enemy eyes and see a resemblance? On second thought, I hope he’s not close enough to see a flicker of anything!

  Toby’s letters are poetic and gentle, though I can read between the lines enough to know his soul is taking a rubbing. It’s the unwritten words which tell of his true feelings. How many years of war will it take to undo the eighteen years of a (relatively) peaceful childhood? I wonder. I worry more for him than his father, who’s had a lifetime of observing the sometimes destructive nature of human beings. My Toby is going to need some careful handling when he gets home.

  He also hasn’t mentioned Roylene lately, probably—knowing Toby—out of respect for me. He doesn’t like to point out anyone’s faults, and my avoidance of that girl is a shining one.

  In my next V-mail, however, I can report a Roylene sighting. I didn’t initiate it, so I can’t brag, but I did speak to her, and she did respond.

  I was sitting on the greens eating lunch with Irene and Charlie the Cowboy (Irene’s been seeing him since that crazy dinner at my house). Turns out old Charlie’s got a perforated eardrum on the left side, so he won’t ever be in uniform. I think he hears just fine, and I sit on the left side and talk really low sometimes and he answers well enough, so I don’t know. But that’s Irene’s business, I suppose.

  Anyway, we were enjoying the Indian summer heat, stretching our legs out over the grass and tilting our heads toward the sun, when I heard a squeaky noise, like the kind a mouse makes when caught in a trap.

  Roylene was pushing a loaded cart up the hill, its shelves piled high with sandwiches and sacks of potato chips. One of the wheels must have been off, because it made a racket. Our eyes met, and I left Irene and Charlie and walked over to Roylene. She had her colorless hair tied up in a knot and a layer of sweat covered her body like the skin on vanilla pudding.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, bringing out my best smile.

  “No,” she said, and kept pushing that darn cart.

  No question mark at the end. Roylene had made a declaration.

  The exchange distressed me, so I made my excuses to Irene and Charlie and walked home. I went to bed early that night consumed with remorse. I should have helped her anyway, right?

  But I made a decision to step back and let things play out. Maybe some part of me knows that’s the way it’s got to be.

  I know you’ll take good care of your boy, and I hope you’ll take good care of yourself. Sounds like Robert is doing a fine job of that, as well. As far as the other stuff, maybe it makes sense to take a step back temporarily. I don’t think you can walk away, but maybe it will give some necessary perspective.

  Sending love over the miles,

  Rita

  September 24, 1943

  ROCKPORT, MASSACHUSETTS

  Dear Rita,

  How relieved I was to get your letter! I felt a whole world of trouble run off my back and for the first time in nearly two months I can exhale properly.

  Oh, the pictures you paint with your words. I can see those women on their knees (thank you for the prayers by the way...my little man is weak, but alive, thank God).

  And Roylene? Is it me or the words you’ve woven that create an unease in my spirit? She seems like a loon. Perhaps you should stick to your guns and steer clear of her? Has Toby written to you about her? Or then a
gain, maybe you just make her nervous. Fear and nerves drive people into strange ways.

  That’s what I’ve been doing lately. Pushing that lazy summer “before” in the back of my mind and rationalizing my behavior with preposterous statements in my diary, like: “I was nervous. And my own fear led me straight into a crazy, spinning time when I did things so out of character I’m still trying to grasp it all.” Silly—but still, the early summer here feels like a hazy, watercolor dream. A dream that I want to forget, but bubbles of it pop up in my mind every now and then. They make me smile. Then the guilt washes over me again.

  Robert is due to ship out overseas soon. I stare at him as he sleeps. We keep Corrine in our bed and the two of them curl around and cling to each other like vine to flower. I want to memorize him more than ever. His jawline, his smell, his grace. For so long I thought his wiry frame weaker than rugged Levi. And now? Now I can’t imagine being held by anything less gentle.

  Levi seems to have gotten over his pouting spell. He and Robert are going about doing all the things they love to do together. Fishing, taking drives into Brimfield to see antiques shows. Getting boiled lobsters straight off the dock and sitting on the benches with hammers, cracking open the goodness. Sometimes I wish I was a man. Men have so much fun together.

  The two of them are gone right now, gone to collect my pale boy from the hospital and bring him home. Robert’s even asked me to encourage MORE of a relationship between Levi and Robbie while he’s gone.

  You see... Robbie has a weak heart now. Like Levi. And Robert thinks having Levi as an influence would be appropriate. Even when I want to get away, life lines up the obstacles. I can’t help it... I feel like this is a test of some sort. A test of biblical proportion. It makes me want to growl. Growl, growl, growl.

  But really, all I am is scared.

  What happens when Robert leaves? Will my fickle ways spread around again? I don’t trust myself. Not one bit. I wish I did.