Mama Kathy looked older, her red hair somewhat faded, her pretty face lined. “I suspect you’re tired, Kathy, after such a trip. Your old room is ready for you. I’ll call you for dinner, and afterwards you’ll tell me what’s on your mind.”
I did as she said, just like the child I had been. And like that child, I put my shoes beside the bed and climbed under the quilt.
Oddly enough, when I began to talk, it was about Crazy Dancer. “He loved to have fun. He called me by my Indian name. And while I was with him I was Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter. He rebuilt the toolbox of his three-wheel motorcycle into a sidecar, and we cracked up. He fitted out an old jalopy so it ran on kerosine. And he took me to an amusement park. When I was with him a kind of wildness took hold of me, and I was as crazy as he was. We sat on the moon, and afterwards he tied a handkerchief over my eyes, and I fed him ice cream.”
Mama Kathy laughed, but when I joined in she looked at me sharply, and I realized my laughter had an edge of hysteria.
“He was a private. He drove trucks. When they sent him overseas, he asked me to marry him, Mama. And I did.”
“Kathy . . .” The word was full of question.
“It was according to Indian ways, a Handsome Lake ceremony, an under-the-blanket marriage. We went to his mother, and she performed it, and neighbors and friends built a little tepee filled with boughs of leaves and flowers. Outside they left food and drink. It was beautiful. I want you to know that.”
She rocked back and forth a few times. “But it wasn’t a legal marriage? No priest, no church? It was not done in the sight of God.”
“I think it was done in the sight of God. We made our vows to Him and to each other.”
She continued to rock.
“We tried,” I said. “We were going to invite you, and Connie and Jeff. But when I telephoned, you told me about Georges.” My God, I was going out of my mind. I had mixed everything up, confused what happened with Erich and my days with Crazy Dancer. I burst into tears.
Mama Kathy reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “So what about your young man? They took him?”
“Yes, they took him.”
“Was he killed?”
“I thought so. I didn’t hear from him. There was a telegram, I heard the ship he was on was sunk.”
“My poor Kathy.”
“I’ve talked and talked, and haven’t said it.” I stood up, walked up and down the small living room, and came to a stop in front of her. “I’m pregnant.”
In the silence I could hear Mama’s intake of breath.
“And not by him,” I said defiantly.
Mama’s hand tightened over the arm of the old rocker. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, Kathy.”
“I wrote you. I married again.”
“Yes, of course. That’s why I’m so confused. But it’s all right. The child is your husband’s,” she concluded with obvious relief. “The Austrian who was your patient, the amputee, is the father.”
“You have the picture, but not all the pieces. His mother, Elizabeth Madeleine Hintermeister von Kerll, came after him.”
“You mean, from Austria?”
I nodded. “She came to take him back.”
“But—but—” It was too much for Mama Kathy. She started again, “But he had a wife and child. . . .”
“He doesn’t know about the child.”
“What?”
I took a deep breath and explained all the counts on which the marriage didn’t work.
“I don’t know, Kathy,” she said as she listened.
I finished and she continued to rock. “I wish I were wiser, but I’m not. My best advice to you is—stay here where you grew up and where you are loved. Give your heart a chance to heal. Eventually your heart will answer you.”
“You think so? You think there is an answer for me? Oh, Mama Kathy, I’m terrified. I don’t know whether I can go forward, I know I can’t go back, and I’m stuck right where I am. I don’t know what’s best for my baby.”
IT’S AN AWESOME thing to be in charge of someone else’s life, to make decisions for them. So I didn’t. Gradually I absorbed the rhythm of the household. The daily cooking, the cleaning, the gardening, the occasional shopping. Evenings we sang the old songs, the songs we’d sung with Papa accompanying us on his accordion, the one he bought from Old Irish Bill. Then one evening Irish Bill himself appeared, an ancient gentleman who led us in “Kevin Barry” and “Polly Wolly Doodle Wally Day.”
Some evenings we updated our songfest with the radio’s hit parade. Once I forgot myself and found I was singing in German, “Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.” Mama Kathy gave me a surprised and quizzical look.
For the most part I mused. I felt very well. Why not, I was full of life. Life swelled my belly, hard and round. I remembered Crazy Dancer’s word for soul, ahcak. I wondered if the new little Kathy possessed one yet. When does it fly in? At birth?
Connie came. She and Jeff drove up in their Ford. It was a fire-engine red sports car, with a canvas top they kept folded down. Jeff was the same nice guy I remembered, but somehow I had expected her to be with Georges. We took our sister walk. We went off together, leaving Mama Kathy to explain.
“It should be like old times,” Connie said, “but it isn’t.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Jeff’s great,” Connie said. “I really love him.”
But he’s not Georges, I finished in my mind.
We walked down by the pond, where the ducks migrated each year. They sailed the surface, miniature galleons, their wakes streaming out behind them. Others, who had foraged further, flew in feet first, braking. We watched heads go down and rears come up and shake with the delight of their catch. We watched the males rise from the water, ruffle their feathers, and preen themselves.
“Do you notice,” Connie said, “they go in pairs.”
Like twins, I thought.
Staring at the mallards, not seeing them, she looked as Erich had when he realized he had only one leg. They’d maimed her too, when they’d amputated her twin.
“I knew,” she said, no longer conscious of me, speaking to the wind. “The weight of the world seemed to crash down on me. I was buried under rubble. I died, Kathy. I died when he did, at the exact moment.”
I believed her. It can happen that way.
“I love Jeff,” she went on. “I love being his wife. But I’m a ghost, Kathy, not here at all. I watch them together, Connie and Jeff. And I smile because it’s very sweet. But her heart is dead.”
I didn’t dare put my arms around her, I didn’t dare touch her.
“The War Office sent Mama the standard we-regret-to-inform-you letter, and his things. He had so little. It was a challenge to him to do without, get by on the barest minimum.”
My stomach knotted, remembering.
“He left a diary. Mama’s going to read it to us tonight. We’ll know what he thought, what he felt. It will be Georges talking to us, saying goodbye. I always thought if I’d had a chance to say goodbye, it would be easier.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “there are special messages for each of us. Or at least for you.”
“You think so?” She caught at my words so eagerly that instantly I was afraid I’d stirred up too much hope.
That evening as we sat together, I told them about the letter I’d received from Austria. Not from Erich, not even from his mother. His attorney wrote that a petition had been approved by the archbishop and cleared with the Vatican. There would shortly be papers of annulment for me to sign.
Connie was momentarily pulled from the endless repetitive grief that mired her. While she didn’t comment directly on what I’d said, she did talk about the baby. She said over and over how excited she was to be an aunt, and agreed with me that it was a girl, and that of course she was Kathy. But I knew what was on her mind.
Mama Kathy took the diary from the pocket of the old leather chair. Connie went chalk w
hite as Mama opened it and began to read. Connie’s hands were clenched, and she leaned forward as though to draw the words out more quickly.
I have come to think that Germany was not equipped to fight a major war. The outcome, I believe, was determined before the first shot was fired. In my opinion it was the state of technology and the decisions made regarding which weapon systems to develop that decided things.
The Germans began the war with a relatively small surface fleet, 57 U-boats, and the Z plan. This called for the building of 29 U-boats per month. A shortage of materiel scuttled this plan. As we discovered, it took them two years from the laying of the keel to the commissioning of a boat.
Yes, yes, I thought, glancing at Connie. Get around to the family, Georges.
At first, Germany had things pretty much their way. The B-Dienst, the German intelligence headquarters, were successful in breaking into our Naval Cipher No. 3, which we used to send instructions to merchant shipping. The Jerries showed up at every rendezvous.
In ’41, however, there was an intelligence failure on their part, one which they persisted in with true German thoroughness. This was the belief that a transmission of under 30 sec. could not be picked up by our Directional Finder equipment. But by then we were able to mount HF/DF equipment on escorts, that allowed us to pick up a message as brief as 20 sec. From that time on the tables were turned, we knew every move they made. This invaluable device looked like a birdcage and was mounted on the top deck of our ships in plain sight. German agents in Spain took hundreds of photographs of it, but never figured out what the birdcage was for.
There was a grunt of satisfaction and a wry laugh from Jeff. Connie’s face was marble. A sense of panic began to rise in me. She was waiting for that special word, she was waiting for Georges to talk to her, and he went on and on about dry technical stuff that no one cared about now the war was over.
Mama had a sip of Coke and continued reading.
Bletchley Park, the hub where I work, is the tracking room. Our job: to detect U-boats. If I hadn’t been so impatient, a similar transmission post was set up a year later in Ottawa. By that time we had established radio stations along the coast of Africa, the east coast of North America, Washington D.C., Iceland, Bermuda, and the Ascension Islands. At Bletchley we got so we could spot exactly who was transmitting. We even named them: Fritz had a strong even stroke, Hans was quick and nervous, and so on. Their styles are so distinct that we refer to them as fingerprints.
Georges went on to describe special buddies. Steve, whose digs he had been on his way to when it happened. Alan Turing was another, a somewhat remote figure, but the undoubted genius of the operation.
It’s quite likely that Turing or at least one of them knows at least one of the opponents he battles in this silent game, where lives and countries and civilization itself are at stake. Both Stephen and Alan, at different times, talk of vacations in Austria and Switzerland. They frequently met up with young Germans hiking the same trails, or in a rest hut on the side of the Matterhorn or Mt. Blanc. They’d share a sandwich, trade stories, laugh together, and talk of their studies. I’m sounding now like sister Kathy with her What-ifs.
I made a gulping sound.
Connie jumped to her feet. “Don’t read any more, Mama. I’d like to take it to my room.”
“Of course,” Mama started to say, but Connie talked through her words, “Did you hear what he said? Did you? He could have stayed right here in Canada. He said so himself. And done the same work. In Ottawa. Why didn’t he wait? Why didn’t he?”
Jeff started after her, but Mama motioned him to stay where he was. “They were very close,” she said by way of explanation, and brought the diary in to Connie.
This worried me more because by now I was convinced that the word she wanted, the special thought for her, wasn’t there. Georges had been caught up in the business at hand, fascinated by the deadly game he played for lives and ships and ultimately for the war itself. His twin was over here on the other side of the ocean. He’d kept his focus fixed. It was natural. It was natural for Georges, at any rate. And I worried.
I didn’t sleep well. Too many dreams collided, broke apart, and couldn’t be called back.
A faint sound disturbed what rest I had, and I found myself listening, not with my ears but with my pores. Something about it upset me, perhaps not being able to identify it. It came, I decided, from the living room.
I got up and very quietly stole across the room and opened the door. I don’t know what Hell or Hades or any of those tormented places looks like, but it was there in front of me.
Connie was on her hands and knees, her hair falling in wild disarray around her. She searched through page after page of what had been Georges’s looseleaf notepaper. The diary was scattered like a snowstorm. Scissors in hand, she was cutting out individual letters and pasting them on a large cardboard, her lips moving as she tried to press the letters into words.
The code. She was attempting to reconstruct the Twins’ Code, like a psychic at a Ouija board, desperately trying to make sense of random letters, force meaning into them. But I could see they followed no pattern. Frantically she interchanged a letter here with a letter there. She was still working with every fifth word.
“Perhaps,” she muttered, “perhaps I started in the wrong place. Perhaps I shouldn’t have started at the beginning—” Her hands swept the letters lying in piles into new configurations.
“Nothing,” she concluded. “He couldn’t spare a word, a thought for me.”
“Words, no. But thoughts—Connie, you told me yourself you knew in your own body the moment he died. What was that except his last, his very last thought? Be content with that.”
She looked up. She hadn’t heard me. “He could have stayed right here. He could have been in Ottawa the whole time.”
I sat down beside her on the floor and began to gather the pages together.
“No, no,” she said, stopping me. “It’s here. I counted wrong. I’ll start again. I is the first word. Count five. Second word is that. Count five. Third word is to. Count five. Fourth word is The. Count five. Fifth word is determined. So, it’s ‘I that to The determined.’ But the capital letter in The, that’s our signal to switch from words to letters. Every fifth letter. But I’m not sure whether to go on, or go back to the beginning. If you go on, it’s b, e, i, u, w, r. That starts out a word, being, and if you skip ahead you get n and g, but the count is wrong. Go back to the beginning. I, c, o, k, G . . . ” She looked at me hopelessly.
“It’s not in the diary, Connie.”
“But I haven’t gone through it all. Maybe it’s not all here. Maybe the censors got at it, tore out some pages at the beginning. We’ve got to start the count right and not miss a single word or letter. If you help it will go twice as fast.”
“It’s not there, Connie.”
This time the words reached her.
She rocked back on her heels and looked at me.
It was a full minute later that I reached out a tentative hand and continued collecting the pages. She watched me put them in a neat pile and fit them back in the notebook. Then with sudden decision she began painstakingly to gather individual letters from the floor. She folded them in a blank sheet of paper and tucked them into the notebook. “You were always so sensible, Kathy. Even when you were a baby, you were a sensible baby. I’m glad you said that, Kathy. I needed to hear it. If you hadn’t said it just like that, so definitely, so positively, I think I’d spend all my life hunting through that diary for what isn’t there. Why does there have to be ‘last words’? That’s kind of crazy, isn’t it, to attach some special significance to last words. This is a diary. An ordinary diary. There’s no code. It’s just the day-to-day diary of a soldier.”
I listened without saying anything as my sister put her life back. She was doing it methodically with grim determination, but she was doing it. I could do it too.
Connie and Jeff left in the morning.
Seventee
n
WINTER MONTHS ARE deep and white and silent here. The snow lodges heavily in tree branches. When the sun shines you can see its structure, a honeycomb of crystals. I think I’d never taken time to notice before. Now things proceeded slowly, calmly, to a new rhythm. My baby grew, filling me. She would be born in the spring. That was when most new creatures arrive. I waited and watched for the first signs of budding.
One day Elk Girl came. Remembering her mysterious appearances at critical times in my life, I was not surprised to see her. She had left me on a stool eating eggs. I had been to war and come back, been married, and soon I’d have a baby. Elk Girl looked exactly the same. She had never been pretty, but from the time we were children, her face was filled with a great dignity.
She didn’t want to sit and chat, but when she saw that tea and home-baked cookies would be served, she changed her mind. Elk Girl could always be moved by food. These days I was perpetually hungry and the smell of baking that so often filled the room was one of my pleasures. We sipped the green Irish tea Mama poured from the kettle with the cozy, and munched and talked, Mama inquiring minutely about her various friends on the reserve.
At last Elk Girl pulled back from the table. “Come to my house,” she said. “I have to show you a few things.”
“What things?”
She laughed and winked at Mama Kathy, who laughed back.
So I got my coat, put on my wool cap and muffler, pulled on mittens, fastened overshoes, and we started out. Any semblance of a road was obscured under snow, but we plowed through it. I knew I wouldn’t flounder if I stuck close behind my guide.
The Search for Joyful Page 27
