Courage in a White Coat

by Mary Schwaner

  “Oh my! You went to school in Chicago? What did you study?”

  “Agriculture.”

  Fred studied the man’s face. He’d been gruff with them at times, but fair. Always fair. Clearly it was their good fortune that the guard assigned to their work detail had spent time in America.

  . . . .

  By the end of their first month of captivity, the fence was completed and everyone moved their things into the schoolhouse camp. It felt luxurious, compared to the cramped quarters of the Provincial Jail.

  The entire elementary school compound was forty by eighty yards, not quite as large as a football field, but it was space. Space to move about, space to grow things, space for the children to play.

  Of the three small buildings, one was used for dining, one for men and women without children, and one for families with small children. Beds were made from whatever they’d been able to collect on their daily sorties for fencing material.

  To their surprise, the gates were left open for a short time each day. Friends among the Filipinos, Spanish, Swiss, and the Swedish Salvation Army were permitted to bring food, fuel, ten-gallon Standard Oil barrels in which to cook and so on, as gifts for the internees or oftentimes for sale.

  One morning mid-week of the second month in captivity, Dorothy watched the bartering and tried without success to tamp down her envy. People were buying things.

  “Fred, look over there.” She pointed to a vigorous bit of haggling that was going on in front of the dining hall. “That fellow has glass jars.”

  “Hm? Oh yes, I see. And a jug, too.”

  “I’m going to buy those glass jars.”

  Fred raised a curious eyebrow.

  “I can sterilize things. Put them in the glass bottles and boil them. Here, look after Bobby while I do this.”

  She handed Bobby over to Fred and pulled a small pouch from beneath her clothing. She turned a bit toward Fred in order to obscure the view of the pouch as she pulled a roll of one-peso bills from the pouch.

  “Dorothy!” Fred exclaimed, but she shushed him. “Where did you get those?”

  He knew that roll alone was more than they’d been able to bring in with them. And he had their money stashed where no one would find it.

  “The Chinaman,” she whispered.

  “He gave you—”

  “He loaned me some money. I’ll pay him back after the war. Now keep Bobby from following me.”

  They all knew that arrangements for cash could be made through a certain local Chinaman, but Fred had not entered into that type of clandestine arrangement. He preferred to think that God would provide.

  And of course, God had. By way of Dorothy’s resourcefulness and a Chinaman’s generosity.

  Dorothy approached the busy vendor and waited her turn, hoping nobody ahead of her had their eye on the glass jars. They were in better view now, and she’d inspected them closely. The rubber gaskets that sealed the lids when they were latched looked nearly new.

  She really had to have them.

  But just as she was about to begin her transaction, the woman who had just completed her trading turned back.

  “Oh, and how much for those glass jars?”

  “Ten peso,” the fellow said.

  “For all five?” the woman asked.

  “Ten peso each one. All five fifty peso.”

  The woman blanched and Dorothy cringed.

  Fifty pesos for five glass jars. It was a fortune. And as badly as she wanted them, she couldn’t countenance it.

  The woman turned away and Dorothy stepped up. And as she did, she saw that the man had a badly blistering burn on the back of his hand. She fished in the pocket of her white coat for the tube of Unguentine she knew was there. It was nearly spent, but there was enough in it to treat the fellow’s wound a couple of times over.

  “Mabuhay, sir,” she greeted. He looked up, surprised that this white woman used the familiar greeting in such a comfortable manner.

  “Mabuhay,” he responded. Its meaning generally meant I hope you are well or something like it. But its literal meaning was may you live. And that is what she intended to do.

  “Your hand needs to be treated, sir.”

  He looked at the back of his hand and sadly agreed.

  “I can see that it pains you,” she continued.

  He nodded.

  “I have Unguentine. For you. If you give me the five glass bottles for ten pesos.”

  A look of overwhelming gratitude came over his face, and he reached out to take the small tube.

  But Dorothy didn’t let go.

  “There are two treatments in this tube. One today and one two days from now.”

  He nodded and tried to accept the tube, but still she held on to it.

  “And I will take all five glass jars for ten pesos. Total.”

  He blanched and began to withdraw his hand. But she moved her hand slightly forward, keeping him in contact with the offered medicine. And at last he relented.

  The tube disappeared into his pocket, along with Dorothy’s ten pesos, and she collected the five glass jars, along with a small roll of wire she’d gotten him to throw into the bargain. It was enough, she hoped, to fashion wire handles for each of the jars.

  It was a small victory, but went miles toward buoying up Dorothy’s spirits. She’d never been good at bartering. Always paid the first price asked. But today she’d acquired a new skill.

  And it seemed she was very good at it.

  She’d had the Unguentine in her pocket because the partially-used tube had been in the parcel Loreto Tupaz had dropped into her pocket last week. And a gift from the “ninety-pound battalion” was not to be wasted.

  Fred’s memoir

  Two times daily a front gate was opened for thirty minutes and vendors were permitted to bring food to give or sell. Sometimes the firewood bundles contained notes from the guerillas upcountry giving news of the War. Money was provided secretly by a local Chinese merchant. An internee could pass a note to a certain fellow internee containing his name and amount of money desired. Within a few days that internee would give the person the amount in pesos. A record was kept and the total amounted to thirteen thousand five hundred pesos. (Peso = $.50) After the War, when I returned to Panay to help reopen the College, I went to the Chinese merchant to repay and arrange for repayment by others, only to be told that all was cancelled because of his gratitude for the winning of the War by the Allies and his safety.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  RUPTURED

  Dorothy returned from the well where it had been the women’s turn to bathe. The saltwater well was inside the compound, but for bathing only. Drinking water had to be carried from the San Augustine Mission next door.

  Use of the drinking water station at the Mission had been hard won, however. Initially, internees were expected to use the well on the grounds of the elementary school prison. But that, of course, was out of the question.

  Commandant Yano finally agreed to provide a tank for drinking water. When it arrived weeks later, the internees found it riddled with holes, top to bottom.

  His reply when the camp committee complained about the leaking tank was simple. Fix it.

  But how? No one in camp had the skill or materials to repair a steel tank.

  After punishing weeks, Yano at last agreed to allow the camp to use the drinking water from San Augustine. But bathing could only be done at the seawater well.

  “Oh, that feels better,” Dorothy sighed as the cool water trickled down her spine.

  The constant state of wariness was taking its toll. Her back and shoulders ached from the tension, and merely letting the water stream across her shoulders worked like a balm. She stood in a metal washtub, dressed in a thin nightshift. Not every woman in the group felt the need for such modesty.

  As she washed, Dorothy looked across to the playground and watched one of the older girls help Carol with the swing. Bobby remain
ed under Ann Waters’ watchful eye. Ann would get her turn at the well when Dorothy returned to watch Bobby and precious baby Mary Alice.

  The children were thriving better than one might expect, thanks mostly to the resourcefulness of Nurse Tupaz. She helped Ann supplement her nursing well enough that baby Mary Alice was growing at a normal rate for a four-month-old.

  Not that it was easy. But at every turn someone’s inventiveness would provide a fairly effective substitution for ordinary conveniences they’d all taken for granted. Whether it was a rat trap or a device to secure the nipple on a baby’s bottle, someone in camp would always invent a clever solution.

  Still, each time the camp forged some new way to improve their status, Commandant Yano would find a way to set them back. He was cruel in his choices, sending in rice and fish but denying them wood to build cooking fires. Or when they asked permission to sell furnishings from their homes to buy food for the camp, he granted the request with a smile. They discovered all too soon that he had already sold most of the furnishings. And no money for food was ever returned to the internees.

  Dorothy gathered her things and headed back to the living quarters with a half dozen mental notes swirling in her head. There were wounds among the internees that she needed to check on, and a small list to make for Loreto.

  Fred was seated on the crude bed he’d created for them out of a sandbox confiscated from the schoolyard, and when he looked up at her, she gasped. His face was drained of color.

  “Fred! What’s wrong!”

  Fred shook his head slowly and winced. He reached a hand to his lower right side and winced again. “It’s a lot of pain, Dor. I don’t know—”

  Dorothy whisked around to kneel in front of him, certain she’d see bruises if he’d been injured, or punched by a guard. But there were none.

  Her practiced fingers probed gently until a quick tap over his appendix told the story. If it hadn’t ruptured yet, it would soon.

  “Fred, we’ve got to get you to a hospital. Now!”

  In a mad scramble, Dorothy called to Ann. She felt a rush of guilt that Ann would have to wait for her bath now. But Ann saw immediately the urgency and hurried her on her way.

  “Go with him, Dorothy! I’ll watch the children,” she called as Dorothy sped away.

  It took precious minutes to convince the guards she needed to see Commandant Yano, and then a half hour to convince the man that her husband needed emergency surgery. The commandant was still in a state of agitation after the guerilla attack the night before. Just a few blocks away his men had fought off the guerilla force for hours when they’d tried to get close enough to liberate the internees. He’d barely managed to keep them from breaking down the gate.

  Now he was suspicious of everything.

  Fred’s memoir

  One night an attempt was made by guerillas to rescue us, but they were driven off. Perhaps it was to our good, for at that time there was no refuge except in the Panay Hills, and no means of escape from the Island.

  The irony of it was that Yano had known Fred before the war. He was a local Japanese businessman who had been conscripted to serve as commandant of their little camp. He and Fred had been teammates on an inter-island tennis team that played a tournament with the adjacent island, Negros. Now he was in charge of keeping Fred imprisoned. Or as the Japanese persisted to call it, “in contained community”.

  He acted as if he wanted to help Fred, but his suspicions could not be allayed. Eventually, he agreed to transport Fred to the hospital and insisted on staying in the operating room throughout the surgery to ensure the patient had no opportunity to escape.

  But Dorothy was not to go.

  If this was an escape plot, he was going to be certain husband and wife were not together. Nothing she said could convince him that since she was a doctor she should accompany her husband. Leaving her children in camp should have guaranteed her return, but he would have none of it.

  The guards roughly helped Fred into a truck and forced Dorothy back inside the gates. But not before she saw Fred’s white face turn to the window of the receding truck.

  She knew what he was thinking. It might be the last time he saw her. His burning eyes conveyed to her everything she meant to him.

  And she prayed. Please God, bring him back to me!

  . . . .

  Once Fred was suitably incapacitated by surgery and drugs, the commandant allowed Dorothy to spend a night at the hospital to attend him.

  It was strange sitting at his bedside in a hospital where she’d functioned as a practicing doctor for two years. She knew the people. She knew every corner of the building.

  It was all familiar. Except for the one thing in which she had taken so much quiet joy. The piece of black glass above her office door. The one that had read Dr. Dorothy Chambers. It had been taken down. And behind her desk sat a Japanese official.

  Dorothy walked the halls while Fred slept. A stranger in her own bailiwick. On the second morning she stood outside her office door and watched the Japanese officer. So strong was the need to let him know he trespassed. So strong was the need to let him know how dramatically he had disrupted her life, how dangerously perilous he had made her children’s world.

  She swept her eyes across every corner of the room, and that’s when she saw it on the hall tree just past the open door.

  Her white coat. The one she’d left thinking she’d be back to get it in a few months after a temporary move to Calinog. The one with the slip of paper in the pocket.

  ...I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God ....

  Whatever the message had been those months ago when she’d written down the snippet of scripture, it held a world of difference from the meaning it carried for her today.

  I press on.

  Her whole being shuddered at the thought of those special words in that special coat in her special place, but out of reach. Hijacked by the foreign presence.

  But why should they be? Why should they be out of reach? The coat was her property. He may have confiscated her office, but the coat was hers.

  Dorothy drew a long breath. It sang along her ribs and bolstered her spine. It lifted her chin and chased the tremor from her hand.

  With resolution flowing in her veins she stepped forward. One step. Two. The Japanese officer looked up. His face held no emotion. No curiosity, no resentment, no welcome, no hatred. He just looked at her.

  Three steps. Four.

  His eyes followed her progress, watched her hand reach for the coat. They moved from her hand to her face and back again. She waited for him to command her to stop.

  He put his pen down. The movement froze her for only an instant, and then she reached out to touch the coat. The familiarity of it overwhelmed her. The history stamped within its fibers flooded her senses. Gauhati. Jorhat. The women. The children. The years it had hugged her shoulders through every victory, through every crisis.

  Her fingers gathered it and lifted it from the coat hook. She turned her eyes toward the Japanese officer. Was the line of his mouth a bit more severe? Was he going to call her out?

  She drew the coat into both hands, and without taking her eyes from the man behind her desk, she slid it on. Left arm, then right. The instinctive roll of her shoulders settled it perfectly, and her hands smoothed the lapel, then dropped to her side.

  Dorothy tipped her head a bit.

  This is mine, her eyes told him. And I’m taking it.

  . . . .

  The coat stayed put on her shoulders throughout the next few days as Fred began to recuperate. The hospital took excellent care of him, and she even had the unexpected pleasure of a three-course meal, most of which disappeared into her medical bag. Thanks to their father’s appendicitis, Bobby and Carol would eat very well this week.

  Fred’s recovery took a very normal course, until a rumor began to circulate regarding the fate of several of his former companions.

 
; During the brief months in Calinog, Fred had been approached by General Cristy of the USAFFE to work as an advisor to injured Filipino soldiers. He had even offered Fred a commission.

  But Fred preferred to serve as a civilian. And that decision was now proving to have saved his life.

  Several of the fellows who had worked with him had been taken by the Japanese, interrogated, and put aboard a ship bound for hard prison time in Japan.

  Somewhere in the Pacific, American warplanes spotted the unmarked ship and sank it. With its hold packed with prisoners. If Fred had accepted the commission offered by General Cristy, he would most likely have been on that doomed ship. The knowledge of it both weakened and revived him.

  Fred knew he’d been led to the decisions he made, and when confirmation of the rumor came via Miss Tupaz that the ship had indeed gone down, his faith stuttered for only a moment, and then lifted him to even greater levels of devotion.

  Fred’s memoir

  From the beginning, for me, there was never a feeling of being imprisoned. I have an unusual tendency to claustrophobia. However, the high walls of the Provincial Jail had no effect. Two reasons may have contributed. From the time Dorothy and I made our decision at Calinog to remain with the Hospital, because we felt it was what the Lord would have us do; and because there was always something to do to help somebody, since we were all in it together. There was a peace and an assurance that carried throughout the internment.

  Fred’s resolve remained rock solid when he and Dorothy returned to the schoolhouse prison camp. Keeping busy kept his mind off the pain, and as a member of the camp committee, he had little trouble keeping busy.

  Fred’s memoir

  Each morning the “executive committee” (a Scottish banker, Dutch Roman Catholic priest, and myself) sat under a tree near the outside fence and listened to “complaints” or suggestions. The complaints ranged from “burnt rice” to “crying babies”. When a British Captain of a tanker—who along with some of his crew were interned—complained that the babies got all the milk that came into camp, Fred pointed out to him the “law of the sea”: women and children first. The fellow was never able to agree that the law of the sea should be observed in camp, particularly if it meant he wasn’t going to get any milk.