by Sally Quinn
Emerson’s quote “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was apropos of the major. His was a little mind. It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that my mother tried to penetrate the barriers, but the staff had been warned about her and she never managed to succeed.
My mother later told me she had gone to see General MacArthur’s wife to plead with her to be allowed to visit me. Mrs. MacArthur was horrified to learn of the situation. Apparently, she had General MacArthur demand to know why this practice was allowed to continue. Unfortunately, he also became convinced that the hospital was so short-staffed that its employees couldn’t manage the parents in addition to the sick children.
I had gotten stronger because of the IV, but every time the nurses and aides had tried to feed me anything, even Jell-O, I threw it up. The stomach pain continued. The doctors gave me something for it, but it didn’t really work that well. They kept giving me tests but never found anything. According to one doctor, whatever I had was psychosomatic. To this day, I think he was right.
A library trolley would come around and I would go through books by the dozen. That was the only thing that kept me sane. What made me crazy, though, was reading about my father and his regiment in the Stars and Stripes, which I knew I shouldn’t be doing. By this time, Daddy’s regiment had become famous. He had acquired the nickname “Buffalo Bill,” and the regiment he led quickly became “the Buffalos.” Although they were on the front lines and taking more casualties than other units, soldiers all over Korea were trying to join them. I was at once proud and distraught. I was certainly riveted.
The major’s daughter, a few years older than I was, had to have eye surgery. After her surgery, she was required to be in a darkened room. The major didn’t want her to be alone so he put me in the room with her for company, where I was unable to read. What was most painful, though, was that her mother came to see her every day.
My mother was allowed to send me some spending money. Every once in a while a nurse would put me in a wheelchair with an IV hookup and wheel me downstairs to the hospital PX (Post Exchange). One day I went down there and a new batch of wounded soldiers had arrived from Korea. They were being brought in from vans on stretchers. Some of them had missing limbs, some had bandages over their eyes. Some were silent, some crying or moaning. The nurse wheeled me over to the side of the hallway to let them pass. After they had gone, we went into the PX.
Inside, my eyes spotted a cross. It was plastic, about eight inches tall and four inches wide and it was the most hideous shade of luminescent chartreuse green. The soldier behind the counter said it glowed in the dark. (It reminded me of my new teeth.) It had a little stand. There were other crosses too, but they were all gold or silver and much too expensive. This was really the only one I could afford. I thought about it for a moment. I knew Daddy was upset with me for not wanting to go to Sunday school and I knew he suspected that I didn’t believe in God though I had never admitted it out loud. I did believe in Jesus, mostly because he was a real person and I didn’t hold him accountable for the suffering in the world.
I decided to buy the cross. I couldn’t think of anything else I could do for my father. I felt so helpless. I gave it to the nurse who mailed it to him. He got it. He wrote me back the most wonderful letter. He told me it was the best present he had ever received and that he would keep it with him always until the day he died. He did.
I had had enough. After several months of being on an IV, I had no veins left. My arms were black and blue, my wrists were shriveled and bloody. My hands and ankles and feet were so bruised that I could barely rest them on the sheets. Sometimes they would have to stick me over and over before they could find a vein. (To this day I can’t have a blood test without lying down and almost passing out.)
At one point I actually began to think about Jesus, about the pain he suffered. I didn’t think of him as the son of God, in large part because I didn’t believe there was a God. And anyway, if there had been, how could he have allowed his own son to suffer so? I wondered if my father was scared or suffering. I wondered about all those soldiers, some only seven years older than I was. They were in Korea fighting and bleeding and dying without their mothers too.
I didn’t want to go on living. I didn’t see any way I was ever going to get out of the hospital. I was never going to get well. I still couldn’t eat. I was never going to see my parents again. I just knew my father would get killed. My best friend in the hospital was a little boy my age named Mikey, who had leukemia. He was in the bed next to mine. When I first got to the hospital, he wasn’t all that sick, but he suddenly got worse. Even then his parents weren’t allowed to see him for the longest time. Mikey and I talked a lot at night after the lights had been turned out. We both decided that we wanted to die. Mikey didn’t have to decide. He really was dying. One day they put up an oxygen tent over his bed. That’s when his parents were allowed to come. His father came back from Korea. They didn’t leave, even at night, but sat in chairs by his bed. It only took a day or two. You could see the plastic tent go up and down as he breathed. Then the breathing got slower and slower and finally it stopped. His mother screamed and started to cry. So did his father. Mikey was dead. I knew what I had to do.
I had to die. That was the only way I could get to see my parents. I willed myself to die. I already wasn’t really eating, but I concentrated very hard on getting sicker.
One night shortly after Mikey died, I started feeling very hot and had excruciating pains in my stomach. My temperature spiked. I could see the nurses were really worried. The doctors still had no idea what was wrong, but a surgeon came in and said they were going to have to do an exploratory. They called my mother and told her they thought I was dying. They also called my father and told him to come back from Korea.
As Mother was getting ready to go to the hospital, Teichi, our houseboy, came into the living room. He was dressed in a white kimono with a sash and carrying a dagger. He knelt down before her and looked up, tears streaking down his face. He held the dagger in both his hands and pointed it to his chest. He was going to kill himself, he told her, by plunging the dagger into his heart so that he could exchange his soul for mine. The gods would be satisfied with this and would allow me to live. Already distraught, my mother was horrified and called the rest of the staff in. They managed to talk him out of it before she left, but she wasn’t totally convinced that he wouldn’t try.
My mother came and my father arrived from Korea. I had never been so happy in my life. It worked! It worked! Now I really could die. They did the surgery, and when I came to, my parents were standing over me, holding my hands. I recovered within a week and was allowed to go home. We were a family again. My father was safe.
As it turned out, my appendix had ruptured and I probably wouldn’t have survived without the surgery. By the next week, I was so well that my father left to go back to Korea. That night I started getting a stomachache. The next morning I threw up. I tried to hide it from my mother, but she found out. I begged her not to take me back to the hospital, but she thought if she didn’t, I really might die.
Again the doctors had no answers. It was decided that I needed better care, and we received orders that I was to be evacuated to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. My mother, sister, and brother were to come as well. What they didn’t tell us was that we would be traveling on a hospital plane with a group of the most severely wounded soldiers.
I can’t decide which circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno best describes that trip. The plane was filled with litters three rows across and five high. We were all assigned litters. There was no place to sit or even sit up. The plane was packed with young soldiers, most of them on IVs as was I, many of them minus one or several limbs. There were severely burned soldiers who were barely recognizable.
Blood was everywhere: dripping from the top litters down onto the lower ones, running along the floor in rivulets, soaked into towels and bandages
, on people’s hands and arms, and all over the nurses’ clothes. I remember the blood well—particularly its smell—but mostly I remember the sobbing, shrieking, wailing, gasping, moaning, begging. It never stopped. “Please, God, help me,” they cried. “Please, make the pain go away, please don’t let me die.” Or almost as frequently, “Please let me die.”
Most heartbreaking of all were the soldiers’ anguished cries for their mothers. My mother spent most of the trip walking (or rather sliding through the blood) up and down the aisles trying to comfort them. She stroked their foreheads if they weren’t burned, she kissed them gently, she held their hands, she listened to their pleas, she told them they were loved. She wrote down the names of family and friends in case they died, promising to write. She lit their cigarettes and brought them chocolates, if they could smoke or eat. Most of them smoked. They asked her to pray for them. She did. I wanted to. I tried to. All I felt was anger. Again I was thinking, How could God let this happen? What good would praying do? I knew a lot of them would die anyway. And they did.
They were dying right and left. The orderlies would come, zip them up in body bags, and take them who knows where on the plane. Quite a few litters were empty when we arrived in San Antonio. I was frustrated because I was too sick and too weak to walk up and down the aisle and help them out. But my sister, Donna (only seven years old then), did what she could, talking to the ones on the bottom litters and even lighting their cigarettes too. She was like a little mascot. Ten years or so ago she attended a reunion of my father’s regiment, the Buffalos, and a much older man came up to her and said he remembered her. He had been in one of those litters and she had lit his cigarette.
I don’t recall much about arriving in San Antonio and being taken by ambulance to the hospital. It was May. I was getting better. I began to eat a little at a time. Moving to San Antonio had been a good thing. I could see my mother every day, I wasn’t reading the Stars and Stripes, my father would be coming home that summer, and I wasn’t totally surrounded by wounded soldiers. Soon I was allowed to go home for visits. My first real meal was Mexican food. Nothing has ever tasted so good.
We lived in a tiny apartment off the post with very little money. My sister was in school. Butchie was having a hard time because he only really spoke Japanese. I was determined to get well. The sooner I did, the sooner we could go to Savannah and Statesboro. I didn’t want Daddy to come home from war and find me sick. By the end of June, after Donna got out of school, they told me I was well enough to leave. I never did get a concrete diagnosis but clearly there was a cause and effect, with my illness connected to my father being away at war.
Shortly before I got out of the hospital, my mother had come to visit me. She told me of all people in the world, she had run into the dreaded major from the pediatric ward in Tokyo. She said she was so filled with rage that she turned on him and spat out the words, “I hope you drop dead!” According to my mother, he died shortly thereafter.
* * *
We moved back to Savannah and stayed much of the summer at the DeSoto Hotel beach club on Tybee Island, spending our days getting sunburned beside the sea and eating french fries on the boardwalk and our nights sleeping under a whirring fan, listening to the waves lapping at the shore.
As we settled into Savannah, my mother decided she wanted us to have our portraits painted. I had had my portrait painted in Kyoto, but it had been after I knocked my teeth out and my face was still terribly swollen. This one would be better, she promised. There was a young artist, Sally Kravitch, who lived in her parents’ big house on Victory Drive. Apparently she was all the rage in Savannah, with a list of names of people who wanted their portraits done by her. Mother made an appointment for my first sitting. Just before we were to leave, my step-grandmother, who was German and would have fit right in with a group of Nazis, pulled me aside. “Don’t touch anything when you go in the house,” she whispered. She pulled out a white lace handkerchief and pressed it into my hand. “If you accidentally touch something, use this to wipe your hands right away.” I took the handkerchief and shoved it into my pocket. “Why do I need to do this?” I asked. “Because,” she hissed, “they’re Jewish.”
I was totally confused. I knew the Nazis had killed the Jewish people—who hadn’t done anything wrong—for no reason. What was so bad about them that I couldn’t touch anything? Were they dirty? Did they have germs? For some reason I didn’t tell my mother what Granny had said. They didn’t get along very well and I didn’t want to cause any more friction. However, I couldn’t understand why my mother would take me to a house that might be infected and cause a health problem.
When we got there, the door was opened by one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. She was blond and blue-eyed and looked a little bit like my aunt Maggie. She couldn’t have been more gracious and welcoming as she led us into the living room, which I remember as painted in all pale creams and blues and much grander than Granny’s house. Beyond the living room was a small studio, full of light, where she asked me to sit. I was very nervous. I kept looking around for signs of contamination but everything seemed pristine, sunny, and airy. Sally charmed my mother and put me totally at ease. I was disappointed when the afternoon was over. We were stunned at how much of a likeness she had created of me, even in that one sitting.
We made arrangements for another sitting. I don’t remember ever going back because Daddy came home unexpectedly and we had to leave Savannah for the next assignment. I never saw the portrait she was working on and never told my parents about Granny, but having met Sally only reinforced my disbelief in a God who would allow anyone who was a Jew to be killed.
* * *
Daddy came back midsummer. He walked up the driveway at my grandmother’s yellow brick house on Habersham Street. He was wearing fatigues, he was sunburned, and his black hair had turned pure white. He looked like a god. My heart nearly burst with love.
Chapter 3
When your life is filled with the desire to see the holiness in everyday life, something magical happens: ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and the very process of life begins to nourish your soul.
—Rabbi Harold Kushner, “God’s Fingerprints on the Soul”
General Wild Bill Donovan, who had been the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, appointed my father to head the transition from the OSS to the Central Intelligence Agency. Daddy had been with the G2 in the Seventh Army in Germany during World War II and had a background in intelligence. We moved back to Washington toward the end of summer. One day my mother was gossiping on the phone to a friend when Daddy came into the room and spotted something in the ceiling light fixture, moved slowly and carefully toward it, and dismantled it. Then he took my mother and me outside. He told us the house was bugged. We had to be very careful about what we said. The house was swept by the OSS the next day. This was our new life.
Before school started, we moved to a house we had lived in earlier, on North Nottingham Street in Arlington. My best friend was a Catholic. I had never knowingly met a Catholic before and was very curious about what this label even meant. How was she different from me? What did she believe? I understood that she and her family ate only fish on Friday and that some people called them “mackerel snappers.” That was about the extent of what I knew about Catholicism. One Saturday she invited me to spend the night and go to church—she called it Mass—with her the next morning. My parents didn’t object, and my curiosity overcame my anti-religion feelings. I was a little nervous but kind of excited as well. What I experienced was far from what I had expected. The Mass was beautiful, mysterious, and moving. I loved the theater of it all—the priests in their fancy garb, the incense burning, the music, and most important, the language, the Latin. The best part of it was that they weren’t saying anything I couldn’t believe, mostly because I couldn’t understand it. I could just sit and feel something transcendent, something I hadn’t experienced before. The Mass didn’t make me th
ink I was turning to religion, but it did give me a sense, for the first time, of what worship was truly about.
* * *
That summer the polio epidemic hit, terrifying everyone, especially mothers. The swimming pools were closed, and we were not allowed to go to the movies or any big events. My parents would hardly let us out of the house to see our friends or play with others. Every day the paper had stories about people dying or being paralyzed, and most horrifying, spending the rest of their lives in iron lungs. Polio really was viewed as a plague. With all the quarantines in effect, by the end of the summer the number of new cases decreased a bit and the hysteria seemed to die down. We were finally allowed to go to school that fall.
One day I was walking home from school, wearing my favorite black-and-white pinafore dress and my black patent leather Mary Janes. It was a lovely fall afternoon and the sun was shining through the dappled dark-green leaves, on the verge of turning brown. For some reason I felt so happy I thought I would burst. I knew my mother would be waiting for me at home with my favorite treat, vanilla custard. She would hug and kiss me and tell me how much she loved me. My mother loved me to pieces, I used to tell my friends. Suddenly I was overcome with a horrible feeling of dread. Something terrible was going to happen to my mother. I started running as fast as I could. When I got to the door there she was, her beautiful soft hands outstretched toward me, and of course, there was the Proustian smell of the vanilla custard wafting from the kitchen. I raced inside and sat down to eat but knew immediately that something was wrong. My mother sat down and put her head in her hands. She had a terrible headache, she said. Her back hurt. She had no energy. I was scared. My mother never got sick. When Daddy got home, she said she wanted to lie down. I could see that her out-of-the-ordinary behavior worried him. Sometime that night he took her to the emergency room, while my grandmother, Nana, watched us.