Courage in a White Coat

by Mary Schwaner

  “Oh that’s grand, Fred. I’m not surprised they would look to you.”

  She smiled and reached for his hand. It felt odd beneath her own. Where flesh normally touched flesh, the hardness of bone was felt. When had that happened?

  Their diet was woefully inadequate, but somehow the loss of flesh had simply happened outside the scope of her awareness. She looked at her own hand, surprised to see that it looked much the same. She looked at Bobby and Carol who played quietly at the edge of the blanket.

  That is exactly what had been worrying her lately. They played quietly. Quietly. Bobby wasn’t full of his fifty questions, and Carol had no urgent stories from school to relate.

  “Fred, I think I should—”

  “Shh! Did you hear that, Dorothy? Did you hear what Don just said?”

  “No, I was just—”

  “He said Reno, Dorothy. Reno! He asked if any of us have visited Reno and then said Reno was closer than we thought. Don’t you see? It’s code!”

  Dorothy tried to make sense of what Fred was muttering below his breath, but it was just a bunch of nonsense. Was this another sign? Was the poor nutrition taking a mental toll that even she had not suspected? But Fred saw her confusion and hastened to explain with covert whispers.

  “Reno, Dorothy. It’s what MacArthur calls his plan for retaking the islands. Don Bell said ‘Reno is closer than we think’. He means the Americans are closer than we think! Closer to retaking the islands!”

  Fred’s face glowed with understanding of what this might mean for them. MacArthur’s plan was working. The Japanese had taken the islands in ninety days. And everyone knew the Americans could do things much, much faster than the Japanese.

  Could it be true?

  After two years of a confinement that was supposed to last only three months, Dorothy had refused to allow herself to contemplate liberation. While she had never given up hope, she had marshalled her thinking to expect many more months of privation. But now, with Fred’s excited words, for the first time her mind expanded to allow the dream of liberation.

  Please let it be true.

  Scattered applause brought Dorothy back to the moment. The braised gravy was done cooling on the cookstove, and she was exhausted. She began to gather up her things, ready to trudge back to the Annex while Fred took care of the cooking paraphernalia. But a movement at the front of the Little Theatre Under the Stars captured her attention.

  The Little Theatre was the camp’s attempt to boost morale. Plays, small skits, and talent shows were chief among their offerings. But in recent weeks there had been fewer presentations. And the folks that had managed to make it to the stage showed less and less energy and more and more wariness. The edgy Japanese listened to every word of every script, even the lyrics of every song. Their misunderstandings were gargantuan, and more than one ‘playwright’ had been harshly dealt with because the commandant didn’t understand irony, exaggeration, understatement, or the many interpretations of words like ‘battle’.

  Tonight a thin, willowy woman walked slowly across the crude outdoor stage, her violin tucked beneath one arm. She moved with the elegance of one who had made the same walk hundreds of times, in concert halls and opera houses, in lovely gowns to complement a tuxedoed orchestra behind her.

  It was Mrs. Nash. Grace Nash. She’d brought her sick little boy to the hospital with a fever that had made even Dorothy fear that they might lose him. The poor woman had been distraught, beside herself with fear just a few weeks earlier. Now she gave her audience a decorous nod. Then, like an elegant ballerina, she tucked her violin beneath her chin, closed her eyes, and swept her bowing arm in a wide arc to hover an instant over the strings. Dorothy felt herself holding her breath as the tension built a moment longer, and then Grace lifted the tip of her instrument, almost as if it were taking a breath itself, and then plunged into an enthralling toss of taunting notes.

  One note skidded into another, some impossibly high, others gliding to rich, low depths. Just as Dorothy felt the music was going to surge into its climactic notes, it dipped again, and Grace added more fever to the ripening scales before dropping to a sustained note. Her long fingers rocked the strings in a slow easy vibrato, and Dorothy found herself dreading the moment the sound would stop.

  But when the moment came, the gifted violinist let it sail away with a quickening of her trembling wrist that spun the toppling final note out into the night. And with infinite delicacy, she tiptoed into the gypsy strain that was the joyous, mystical meat of the piece.

  If the ringing prologue was its gemstone, this precocious dance was its heart, and Grace’s eyes remained closed as she played. But her eyebrows danced their own expressive motif as she leaned and stretched her upper body through the haunting rigors of the piece.

  It was as if every note extracted energy that Grace could not possibly afford to expend, and the sheer gift of exhausting herself in behalf of this audience’s evening entertainment overwhelmed Dorothy. It became too much, and Dorothy silently begged her to stop. She strained toward the stage and implored the woman to cease, to save what small store of energy she had. Did she not know that she needed every ounce of it merely to survive?

  But Grace played on, seeming to draw from some fortifying well that lived deep within the melody.

  The music dipped into languid hollows and then taunted with a maddeningly slow progression toward the ripping tempo with which it raced toward its finale. It was not until Dorothy felt her own heart might burst that the woman drew from the instrument a final note. It wavered, spun, and then melted into the starry heavens, taking with it the fears of a people who had been robbed of their own music.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  SWEET JESUS

  The haunting core of the music stayed with Dorothy through the coming days. It breathed into her soul a promise that whatever effort was required of her, she would rise to the task.

  Dearest Mother,

  There are no words to describe captivity. It’s akin to being suspended inside a heartbeat. For weeks. For months. And then something comes along that bumps that heartbeat into a steady stream of heartbeats. That opens eyes and restores smiles and makes life seem actually normal.

  You never know when it will come, that bump that will jolt you out of the desperation that lives behind your eyes, carefully guarded. But you long for it in your sleep, in every minute of the day. You can’t really put a name to it, or shape your want into terms that don’t sound completely ridiculous if you voiced it out loud. But it’s there.

  Always.

  Waiting.

  Relief boxes from the American Red Cross provided that bump on December 17th of 1943.

  Fred’s memoir

  Because the Japanese Imperial Army recognized no authority but its own power (Japan had not signed the Geneva Accord) they did not permit Red Cross supplies to be delivered to Santo Tomas. However, a clerk in the Japanese headquarters in Manila, who was friendly to the USA, stacked some papers so the Commandant would sign them without realizing he had signed a permit to unload Red Cross Comfort Kit boxes in the Manila bodega for the Camp. Once signed, there could be no changing, so some of us were taken in trucks to the bodega and brought the supplies into Camp. They contained everything from food and cigarettes to sulfa drugs. There was considerable exchange of contents among the internees, some insisting on receiving their share of cigarettes, although they did not smoke, in order to exchange them for food. The most valuable outcome was that with an epidemic of measles and whooping cough, not a death resulted because of the sulfa treatment.

  The comfort kits so long awaited were more than food and medicine. They were more than shoes and cigarettes. Not that long ago the boxes had sat in front of American workers. On American assembly lines. On American soil. Packaged and labeled by American hands.

  Dorothy sat with her hands on the open box, making contact with home in the only way she could.

  The contents of the box
were safely stowed now. But the box still sat in a place of honor in their tiny cubicle. Carol made the box into a home for her dolly. Bobby crawled inside and turned it into a ship. Or a plane. When he took a nail and started to scratch pictures in the side of the box Carol stayed his hand.

  “This is a special box, Bobby.”

  Dorothy had dealt for two days now with the aftermath of the wealth that arrived in those special boxes—the physical injury that occurred when internees squabbled with one another, claiming someone had stolen their tin of potted meat. Or that someone had swiped their tin of butter and replaced it with a smashed one. Or a starving internee who defended her relief box with fists even though she had willingly wagered it against the Japanese in the infamous baseball game. But mostly it was the painful indigestion, diarrhea, or bloating from having over-indulged in the contents of the box that Dorothy had to contend with in her patients.

  When a person is on a path to starvation, pacing oneself can be the challenge of a lifetime. And it was a challenge that many internees lost and the children among them couldn’t comprehend.

  For Dorothy, the challenge was keeping her mind on her work instead of dreaming about the special treat she’d give her family to supplement that evening’s meal. She’d never had this dilemma in her entire life. When she was on duty, her work had always fully occupied her attention. But now the distraction of food revealed a weakness she hadn’t expected.

  She smiled, thinking of the reverent way her children had unpacked the long-awaited box. Bobby and Carol had no idea what some of the items were. They’d never seen a whole cardboard canister of KLIM before. For them it was a sweet drink. For her it was a miracle drink. Sweet powdered milk packed with protein and Vitamin A and D. If she could bathe her family in it she would, so great was her belief that it was key to their survival. And Bobby couldn’t wait to get his hands on the canister once it was empty. It was the most engaging ‘toy’ he’d seen in months.

  Now that they had a whole canister, Dorothy’s challenge was making it last as long as possible. If she mixed it quarter-strength it would last six months. Part of the ongoing dilemma was the two-and-a-half ounces of water allowed per child per day. That was certainly not enough to get any good quantity of KLIM into the children.

  But there were ways around that particular stumbling block. KLIM could be mixed into the watery lugao of rice and weevils and talinum weeds and brought to a boil. If it wasn’t boiled, the KLIM just stuck to the talinum leaves that floated on the surface of the sadly unpalatable soup. But once boiled into a bit of a mush with KLIM, the children quite liked it.

  It was the people who drank the KLIM full strength that found their malnourished stomachs rebelling. If she paid good attention to it, she could give the children a good bit of nourishment every day for half a year. Bobby would just have to wait a good long time to get his hands on the empty container.

  . . . .

  “Sweet Jesus, that was good.”

  A startled silence swept over the small family that crouched in a circle on the floor of the Chambers cubbyhole.

  Dorothy, Fred and Carol turned as one and stared at Bobby as he licked the chocolate from his fingers, the sound of his inappropriate comment still ringing in their ears. Fred had judiciously rationed each family member one-half of one square of one of the chocolate bars the kit contained, and with great pomp and ceremony they’d each popped the small treat into their mouths on the count of three.

  Too many in camp had already learned the hard way that these chocolate bars were packed with more than just good sweet chocolate. They were the D-ration bars, made to last a downed pilot several days, his only sustenance while waiting to be rescued. Eat them too fast, in one sitting, or even in one day, and misery knew no bounds. The groans coming from the restroom areas were clear and ominous testimony to that fact.

  Sweet Jesus?

  Dorothy darted a glance at Fred. Which one would field this bit of discipline? It was such a joy having something to celebrate. It had been months since anything like this had captured the enthusiasm of the camp, had fostered such an undercurrent of swapping and neighborly dickering, even though jealous hording was the primary reaction of the day.

  Neither parent wanted to spoil this moment with a reprimand. But Sweet Jesus? That kind of language simply could not be overlooked.

  “Robert Bruce Chambers, you watch your mouth!” Carol’s little voice broke the silence, her scolding tone muted by her own smacking lips.

  Bobby slapped both his hands over his mouth and raised his eyebrows, darting a wild-eyed look at his mother and father. Then confusion settled on his face and his hands fell away.

  “What?” He looked at all three, then scrunched his scrawny shoulders. “What did I say?” His tone was incredulous. One could almost see his three-and-a-half-year-old mind replaying the last few moments and finding nothing that begged for a scolding. “What did I say?!”

  “You said ‘Sweet Jesus’!” Carol pointed her finger at her brother, saw a bit of errant chocolate there, and set about to lick her finger clean.

  “Well, you just said it, Sissy, so you watch your mouth!”

  “Did not!”

  “Did too!”

  “Did __”

  “Hold on, now, you two.” Fred’s voice of authority squelched the squabble. Both children fell silent, hands dropped in their laps, faces suitably chagrined, awaiting judgment.

  “Bobby, why did you say those words? Sweet Jesus?” He stared Bobby down, crinkling his brows a bit to soften the inquisition.

  Bobby looked to his mother. Maybe, just maybe she was going to intercede for him. But Dorothy just lifted one eyebrow and cocked her head a bit as if to say ‘Better speak up, son’.

  “I’m waiting,” Fred urged.

  Bobby squirmed. He was in trouble and he didn’t have a clue why. People said ‘Sweet Jesus’ all the time. Then realization dawned and he knew just how to fix it.

  “Well, I meant, um, what I meant was...was..., ‘Sweet Jesus, that was good. Amen!’”

  Bobby’s face brightened in victorious jubilation as he watched his mother and father sputter and spasm. For some reason his comment had reduced his parents to suspicious gurgling coughs.

  At last his father managed a serious expression, gave him a swift lecture on the appropriate use of the Lord’s name, and they folded their hands and bowed their heads to give thanks for this bounty that had come all the way from America. And in their prayer—underscored by rumbling tummies—they named each precious bit of food individually, rolling the words around on their tongues as if the words themselves were the appetizer.

  One pound can of KLIM powdered milk

  One pound can of oleo margarine

  Half-pound package of cube sugar

  Half-pound package of Kraft cheese

  Six-ounce package of K-ration biscuits

  Four-ounce can of coffee

  Two D-ration chocolate bars

  Six-ounce can of peanut butter

  Twelve-ounce can of salmon or tuna

  One-pound can of Spam or corned beef

  One-pound package of raisins or prunes

  Five packages of cigarettes

  Seven Vitamin-C tablets

  Two bars of soap

  Twelve ounces of C-ration vegetable soup concentrate

  Dorothy picked up each item, feeling joy in the need to ask God’s blessing on the bounty. How long could she make it last?

  She would puree the Spam with a splash of carabao milk to make a paste and spread it on the bomber bread she would bake in the little tramp oven—if she could find some fuel to burn. It would go much farther that way. The coffee she would trade for powdered milk from someone else’s box. The vegetable soup concentrate would show up in everything, bit by bit, adding unexpected flavor. Her mind clicked off the possibilities as she organized the little cache. She reached for the last item, the four-ounce tin of coffee that Fred had cradled to
his chest. He resisted, his eyes beseeching her to let him hang on to it a moment longer.

  “Fred,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

  His face fell. “Couldn’t we just...”

  “No!” She hadn’t meant to be so sharp with him but for heaven’s sake, he knew it had no nutritional value whatsoever. He knew there were those like him who craved it, who didn’t have children to feed and would willingly give up their ration of powdered milk for it. He knew it. Why was he challenging her?

  Rations had fallen dramatically again. Breakfast was a mere cup of thin, watery mush and a quarter cup of hot water. Lunch was served only to the children and very elderly internees. Supper was mush or sometimes mashed Philippine sweet potato. Never satisfying. Never rejuvenating. Never enough.

  How hard it was each evening to lead the children in asking God’s blessing on their food without railing silently at Him for letting her feel so helpless to fill her children’s tummies.

  She raised an eyebrow at Fred, then slowly cocked her head, her lips pressed tightly in disapproval.

  With a heavy sigh, Fred handed over the precious tin. He’d embarrassed himself and he knew it.

  Oh, how she would have loved to tear open that tin right now and brew him a cup of coffee. Oh, how she wanted to see that euphoric face he would make as he savored each sip. Oh, how she desperately wanted to make him smile.

  Dorothy reached up a hand to cradle his face. She would make it up to him one day. When they got out of here. If they got out of here.

  Dorothy composed her face, hoping that thought hadn’t written itself too plainly in her eyes.

  God would provide. God would give them the strength and courage to do the hard things that might ensure survival. She knew that. She did.

  But today, even in the face of this unexpected bounty, it was becoming harder to feel such rock-solid assurance.

  It was odd how easily thinking of another half year in captivity had infiltrated her thinking. For the first two years she’d felt every month would be the last. Surely they would be liberated soon.