You’ll be interested to know that Inez, Arielle, and Julio are partnering with a chef whose restaurant was destroyed, and they are soliciting funds to reopen Pearl Blue as a restaurant/nightclub. I wish them luck, but I feel they are going to miss your guidance very much.
Julio asked me to tell you that he found the message about the Nissyo Maru you left inside the piano. Miguel ran it to Davy, who was able to send it to General MacArthur. Hearing that, I did some detective work for you. One of our pilots had spotted the Nissyo Maru and had targeted it for bombing. He got the message that the hold was filled with American prisoners, and he gave up the mission. A submarine followed the Japanese ship and reported that it had docked in Tokyo.
Gina dropped the letter to her lap. So some good had come out of that terrifying night when she’d been captured and Ling had been murdered—perhaps some soldiers on that ship had lived to return home. She resumed reading.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the devastation of Manila from others. It’s going to take a long time to rebuild the city; most buildings in the business district were leveled, with only scattered ones standing, and those suffered extensive damage.
I’ve lost track of Clara, our tireless Red Cross nurse. Dion was captured, but he managed to escape during the vicious battles after MacArthur returned. He’s back in Cabanatuan City working in the marketplace as before. On a cheerful note, Trixie married Dion’s oldest son in a life-affirming ceremony that I happily attended.
As for me, Dr. Lopez and I are working with architects to rebuild Remedios Hospital. The army has just bulldozed away the rubble. It’s heart wrenching; there are bones in every shovelful, and I cannot stay for more than a minute to watch. Funds are coming in, and when completed, the new hospital will be beautiful and modern. In the meantime, we are working out of makeshift shelters. The American doctors and nurses who are volunteering their time and expertise in this hour of need are a blessing.
I hope our paths cross again after the rubble is cleared, the bad memories have dimmed, and the trees and flowers are in full bloom.
In love and peace,
Franca
Gina sat a long time holding Franca’s letter. Would the bad memories dim? Would flowers ever bloom in her heart again? She thought she had become tough and hard and unable to be hurt, but now on safe soil, she felt as vulnerable as ever.
November came with its cooler days. Cheryl had adjusted to her new life and was doing well in the fourth grade. Knowing she couldn’t live on her dad’s savings forever, Gina rented space in a building in town, where she planned to open a theater arts studio and teach voice and dance. She was excited to get started on the renovations.
Today she was raking up the last of the fall leaves in the front yard, and the mundane task let her thoughts drift off in any direction. She had enjoyed, she mused, the best Manila high society had to offer, and she had survived the worst the Japanese army had thrown at her. Now here she was, back where she had started: in middle-class America raking leaves. She felt she had changed, but she didn’t know how, and in her mind, she began to assess her new attributes.
However, she saw the Western Union boy bicycling on her street. A telegram delivery wasn’t unusual, but then why was she holding her breath? She watched him approach, trying to gauge if he was slowing down, or would he whiz by, leaving her still in the abyss of unknowing regarding what had happened to Ray?
The messenger bicycled into her driveway. “Telegram for Mrs. Raymond Thorpe.” He handed her an envelope, but Gina’s hand shook so hard she dropped it.
He picked it up. “Would you like me to open it for you?”
She noticed red hair curling around his ears under his cap. “Yes, please.” She closed her eyes.
She heard paper tearing.
“You may want to open your eyes and read this, ma’am.”
She listened to the tone of his voice. Was it upbeat, or were the words delivered in a minor key like a sad song? She opened her eyes and read the message:
IN MANILA. HAD TROUBLE FINDING YOU. NOBODY KNEW A GINA THORPE. CHAN CAME TO THE RESCUE. I’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. A MILLION KISSES AND A THOUSAND HUGS TO YOU AND CHERYL. RAY
Gina had no control over the laughter that burst from her followed by tears that coursed down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her sweat-covered hands. “You have no idea the joy,” she gushed, hugging the messenger, who stood uncomfortably stiff in her grip.
He flashed a broad grin as he stepped out of her embrace and straddled his bicycle. “My pleasure, ma’am.”
“Wait. Don’t go.” Gina ran into the house and rummaged through her purse, finding only a ten-dollar bill, a lavish tip for the young messenger. She didn’t care. She’d just received a million kisses and a thousand hugs, and she wanted everyone to be as rich as she was. Ray was alive. He was in Manila, and he would be home for Christmas.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
During World War II, tens of thousands of American civilians were trapped on Pacific islands and at the mercy of the invading Japanese military. Those surrendered or captured were placed in internment camps, the topic of my first book, A Pledge of Silence. Others evaded capture and survived, one way or another, in the occupied country, many of them women alone or with children, which is the topic of this book, Along the Broken Bay.
The dispositions of the lone women who escaped capture varied: some colorful, like Claire Phillips, an entertainer who owned a nightclub in Manila; others heroic, like Yay Panlilio, a journalist who became a guerrilla; or gutsy, like Margaret Utinski, a nurse who worked for the Japanese-run Philippine Red Cross; or brave, like Viola Winn, a missionary who fled with her four very young children to live in fear and deprivation in the mountainous rain forests.
My characters are fictional, composites of the personalities of whom I read, and no one person in my research encountered the many travails of my fictional characters. Within that scope, Along the Broken Bay paints a reasonable facsimile of life on an occupied Pacific island during World War II.
A word about the epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter. I wanted to keep Ray alive in the reader’s mind and settled on following his emotional progression during his three-year imprisonment from anger, disbelief, and curiosity to doubt, questioning his sanity, mentally escaping, and then living in the spiritual. My source for this information was Man’s Search for Meaning, by Dr. Victor E. Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor.
For further reading I recommend the following memoirs:
Manila Espionage, by Claire Phillips and Myron B. Goldsmith, 1947. Republished in 2017 as Agent High Pockets: A Woman’s Fight against the Japanese in the Philippines.
Miss U, Angel of the Underground, by Margaret Utinski, 1948, 2017.
The Crucible: An Autobiography by Colonel Yay Panlilio, Filipina American Guerrilla, by Yay Panlilio, 1950, 2009.
Three Came Home, by Agnes Newton Keith, 1947.
Guerrilla Wife, by Louise Reid Spencer, 1945.
For pictures, videos, and to meet the real people who inspired my fictional story, visit my website at florajsolomon.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s no secret: I had a lot of help putting this book together. Many thanks to the members of the Writers’ Roundtable at St. James Plantation who critiqued my raw chapters and were generous with their suggestions. A special thank-you to Evelyn Petros, a novelist, screenwriter, former international opera singer, and friend, who shared with me her experiences in the theater and helped me design Pearl Blue.
Knowledgeable and well-read beta readers are a must-have, and mine were Emily Jane Gillcoat, Beth Arlene Schodin, Barbara White, and John and Pat Whiting. A special thank-you to my husband, Art, who gracefully put up with me living in an alternate world several hours a day and multiple times helped me rescue my protagonist when I had written her into a corner.
Lake Union Publishing, an Amazon imprint, makes publishing a painless process with its cadre of editors and design
ers. Thank you to Danielle Marshall, Christopher Werner, Tiffany Yates Martin, Nicole Pomeroy, Stephanie Chou, Riam Griswold, and the many others whose names I don’t know, for adding their special polish to my manuscript.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2012 Jerry Dycus
Flora J. Solomon worked as a researcher and analyst in Michigan’s university system and health care industry. She started writing after retiring and moving to the North Carolina coast with her husband. Her first novel, A Pledge of Silence, won the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for general fiction and was selected as a Historical Novel Society Editors’ Choice. When not sitting at her computer creating stories, Solomon can be found on the golf course, on the tennis court, or—most naturally—at the beach.
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