Some Luck

by Jane Smiley

  Frank was good at telling the stories, and Arthur loved them. Arthur had a story, too, it turned out. Lillian was all ears. Did Frank realize that when the Allies invaded Sicily the Germans thought they were planning to invade Greece? That was why there was no one on the beaches, except to the east.

  Frank said, “We were surprised.”

  “We played a trick,” said Arthur. “We all helped. We made up a guy, gave him a whole career, a family, papers, ID, monograms, pictures of his dog, ‘Duna.’ The Brits and the OSS talked back and forth about him and how important he was for a year in a code that we knew they had broken before we let his corpse wash up on the beach in southern Greece, and when it did, it was carrying plans for the invasion of Greece, meeting up with the Russians, all kinds of information. When he died, I rather mourned him. We all did. But it worked.”

  “It was so quiet there it spooked me,” said Frank. “And I was right.” Lillian saw that there were plenty of things that had happened in the war that Frank and Arthur were never going to tell her about. Mama would have tossed her hand, clucked, “And rightly so! Less said about any number of things!” But it made Lillian feel startled and anxious, as if a wall of the house had vaporized.

  After they went to bed at their regular time, Lillian could hear Frank pacing around the living room until she dropped off. In the morning, he was already up and dressed by the time she had her robe on. He ate his Cheerios and the toast she made in her brand-new Sunbeam toaster, thanked her, and smacked her backside (“behind”) again, and when she skipped out of the way, he said, “Bad habit. Sorry, Lil.”

  “Don’t try it with Mama.”

  Frank laughed.

  He went out with Arthur, and they walked together to the train—Arthur to work and Frank to Union Station, then Chicago and home. Arthur was impressed. That night, he said, “We talked nonstop. He’s brilliant, your brother, and he has his eyes wide open. If there was anything that escaped his notice in the last four years, I’d sure like to know what it was. We should definitely help him find a job around here.”

  “I’d like that,” said Lillian.

  THEY HAD TO POSTPONE Frank’s coming-home party at the last minute, and for a sad reason—Mrs. Frederick died, and though you couldn’t say it was unexpected, you had to say it was sudden. She had been able to do almost nothing in the last year. They had moved her bed down to the dining room, and she didn’t even get out of it to go to the bathroom—Minnie had a bedpan and an old-fashioned slop bucket, and did it all herself, wiping and washing and changing the bedclothes and emptying the slop bucket. That house was the first in the area with indoor plumbing; they could have more easily had her upstairs. But it was strange, Rosanna thought, the little choices you had to make that you never foresaw, such as was it easier to be closer to the bathroom or to the kitchen, did you stow an invalid who could barely move upstairs, where she was out of the way, or did you have her right where everyone who came in would go over to her and take her hand and say hello and then include her in the conversation? Of course, Minnie did the kindest thing, and also never complained about the slop bucket or anything else. Lois was a little put out, though she didn’t say it. But Lois was sixteen now, and her childhood had been an utter tragedy. Roland Frederick was a useless man. He stopped doing his farm work and, it was said, roamed from tavern to tavern in Usherton. Lois was pretty enough, but she always looked down in the dumps, and though Rosanna, who had plenty of time, sewed her some nice outfits for school, she didn’t wear them with any flair. She let her hair go, too. You could look like a nanny goat, as Rosanna considered that she herself now did, but, still, you ought to be neat and trim.

  Frankie didn’t say a thing about the party, and probably did not care, but he let Rosanna drag him all around Denby—into Dan’s store and the café and the church and every other little place, including the tiny room where Maureen Thompson was now cutting and curling ladies’ hair, and everywhere, men and women and kids grabbed him and hugged him and thanked him for his service. Old men sat him down and bought him coffee and asked to hear all about it, and Frankie told them this and that, such as where he’d served and whether he liked Africa or France better, and what the mud was like, and how was his German now, and did he believe this story that they were telling about the Jews and the camps, and what about the Russkies. Frank said what he thought. But he kept smiling and nodding, and after listening in on a few of these conversations, Rosanna realized that the new Frankie was just like the old Frankie—he listened more than he talked, and the other fellow went his way reconfirmed in his opinions, not having learned much that was new.

  For the first two weeks, Frankie said nothing about what was next, nothing about a job. He drove the new tractor a few times, and he could still plant a straight row, but he didn’t seem to notice the disappearance of the chickens and the cattle—all they had was hogs now, and not many of them. Just corn, corn, corn, everywhere corn. Nor did he take down his gun and set out to shoot any rabbits, though he did move the board in the wall beside the case to find eight dollars, which he split between Henry and Claire. When he wasn’t riding the tractor or being shepherded about town, he was gone to Usherton in Walter’s car or walking around the farm. He must have crisscrossed the farm ten times. When Rosanna asked him why, he only ran his hands through his hair and said, “Used to it, I guess. Can’t stand sitting around anymore, even when moving is pointless.”

  “You should get out your old bicycle.”

  “That’s a good idea.” But he didn’t get it out.

  He stayed up late with the radio low and got up early. Walter remembered being the same way when he got back from France—lasted for six months. “I was gone for a year. Frank was gone for four, so I guess this’ll last for two years.”

  Rosanna said, “He doesn’t seem to be drinking.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, Mother, I’m not spying on him. Soldiers drink. That’s what they do. A decent, well-run army gives them something to drink, like the Brits.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Walter!”

  “Well, what do you think we did in our spare time in France? Most of us knew how to rig up a still, and there was plenty of wine that needed to be brandy.”

  “I think he had worse things happen than you did.”

  “Rosanna,” said Walter, “I think he did.” They looked at each other, but what was there to say? There was no entry into Frankie’s heart, if there ever had been, at least for them. But Walter had answered the letter Lillian sent about seeing Frank in Washington, and Lillian had replied, and Walter had said to Rosanna, “I guess you’d better start knitting a baby blanket.” That very evening, sitting in her chair in the front room, Rosanna had brought out the pink, blue, and yellow seed-stitch piece she was working on, and Walter saw that she was already more than half finished. Rosanna calculated, though—if the child was due in July, that was a good time for Rosanna to take the train to Washington, and there would be a lull in the farm work right around then, too, so Walter could just put on some regular shoes and a nice shirt and come along. Had they ever seen the White House? No, they had not. Nor any ocean of any kind. Stuck on the farm like two shoats struggling in a hog pen. The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn’t be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew they were really scouts.

  JOE’S EXCUSE for not seeing much of Frank when Frank was around had been that it was planting time, of course. They did have that one day where Frank helped him with the Frederick field, which was a hundred acres now, and as flat as a griddle. Maybe that had been a bad idea, Joe thought afterward. He could see Minnie at the windows, first downstairs, then upstairs, watching the tractor. And she came over twice and sat with Frank. Every time he said anything, she smiled, and when he greeted her by kissing her on both cheeks, she blushed. That wasn’t the Minnie he knew—his Minnie was practi
cal and down-to-earth, always happy to see him, but slipping away like a fish in a pond when he tried to put his arm around her. She always said, “That’s not for me, Joe. Don’t know why,” leading him to believe that he was first in line if she changed her mind. But he wasn’t first in line.

  It was Lois who said, one day when Joe was cultivating that field and went to the house to fill his water bottle and soak his bandanna again before laying it over the top of his head under his hat, “So—tell me one thing. Why is everyone falling all over themselves about your brother Frank?”

  “Well, he served in some pretty big battles.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the reason. They say it’s the reason. But then they say, ‘Oh, Frank. I always knew he would get ahead.’ ”

  “Minnie says that.”

  “And everything else—he looks like Henry Fonda, he’s so tall and strong. He used to be blond, but this is nicer, really.” She was good at mimicking Minnie’s delivery. “Me, I don’t see it. He looks kind of scary to me. I like you better. You’re nice.”

  “Well, you know me.”

  “Well,” she insisted, “you are nice. You are nice to us every single day, and I for one know it.”

  “Well, maybe I can’t help myself,” said Joe.

  “You sound like it’s a fault.”

  That night, lying in bed, Joe wondered if he thought being nice to Minnie and Lois was a fault. Across the room, his collie, Nat, was spread out all over the bed Joe had made him out of an old quilt, and the cats were sleeping in the front room, where they always did—Pepper in the chair by the window and Booster on the heat register. Out in the old barn, he still had two milkers, Betty and Boop, the last in the neighborhood. When they calved, he sold the calves as vealers, but he named them and let them live with Betty and Boop until they were a few months old. This year’s pair he had named Harry and Bill, even though Bill was a heifer. He had four rabbits in a hutch—Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Moe—and no earthly use for them. Rosanna said, “Do you name the houseflies, too?” and Walter always shook his head at the impending doom of naming animals you yourself were going to kill. Rosanna felt that letting the cats in the house was especially horrifying, and she didn’t know that Joe let them walk all over the kitchen table and the kitchen counter—was he as bad as Rolf yet? What had Rolf done in this house that had demonstrated his propensity for decline?

  After Frank left, Minnie told Joe that she had to get busy now; her mother had died, and maybe she and Lois had better move to Cedar Falls, so that she could at last get her teacher’s degree and do something with her life. Lois was in her sophomore year—she could spend the last two years at a school where no one knew a thing about them or their father or their mother, and that would be good for both of them. Best to make up their minds that they were on their own now. Roland Frederick, Joe knew, wasn’t violent, but he was unpredictable. He had gone off, no one knew where, but he could always reappear.

  All of this sounded fine, and he was so nice, so damnably nice, that he said, “You should do it, Minnie, you should. I think it’s the best idea.” What was it, sixty or seventy miles to Cedar Falls? Not a distance that he would comfortably travel, with Betty and Boop and Pepper and Booster and Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Moe waiting for him at home.

  IN THE END, Arthur found Frank a job for the government, not in Washington, but in Ohio, near Dayton. What Frank discovered on the job was that he was not alone in wondering what made the German army so good. His job was to go through papers—thousands and thousands and tons and tons of papers that had been uncovered, discovered, recovered by the Allies all over Germany in the last two years of the war. He even had a surprise—a squad from his own Seventh Army had set out from Berchtesgaden, probably on the very same day when Ruben was turning up his button and his spoon, and gone to a cave not far away, the very cave where Himmler had stored all his papers and then dynamited the entrance closed just before the end of the war. The most remarked-upon papers from that cave were the ones about death-by-freezing experiments: If you submerged a man in freezing water, how long would it take for him to get past reviving? The answer was, anywhere from about an hour to just under two hours. And every measurement was taken by the observing scientists as the subjects died—temperature, blood count, urine samples, pulse. Other subjects were successfully revived, by immersion into hot water, Frank gathered.

  But the documents he enjoyed reading were not about making cheese in ninety minutes or the effects of “ionized air” or how to make rayon warmer by crimping the threads. He was mildly interested in something called Periston, which appeared to be fake blood, and the fact that a German U-boat was so well insulated and refrigerated that it could travel for months without surfacing to take on drinking water. What interested him the most was an infrared gun sight that had a range of three kilometers, in the dark. Frank felt immediately that he had been viewed by such a sight—maybe many times—that he had appeared as a fluorescent image on a tiny screen. It turned out that the marines in the Pacific had employed the thing once it was confiscated from the Germans, but Frank had never heard of it until now.

  Because of the war, Frank’s speaking German was pretty good, but he had to work hard at reading the papers. For a while, his main job was just to sort them and box them—he at least knew when one set of papers ended and another set began. Even though others had translated enough to be taken aback, maybe amazed at what they found, there were vast quantities still to go through. American companies of all kinds were waiting for the results; the promise was that everything found would be published and go straight into the public domain. Each afternoon, when Frank left the giant building, formerly an airplane hangar, he saw rows of men who had read the weekly bibliography of patents and procedures, standing in line to buy the documents or to order the ones that hadn’t been printed yet.

  Otherwise, Dayton was not that different from Usherton, and Frank was restless there. As a result, he went back and forth to Washington (in his new car, a Studebaker Champion) about once a month—he could get there in six or seven hours if he drove at night. Arthur and Lillian amused him, Arthur because he was genuinely amusing and Lillian because she was so obviously enjoying both Arthur and Timmy. Timmy, said Rosanna and even Walter (who had come in September), looked exactly like Frank himself. Sometimes, Frank squatted down in front of the playpen, watched Timmy, and tried to make something out about him—what he remembered most clearly from his own childhood was that lattice of ropes underneath Walter and Rosanna’s bed, that feeling of dim enclosure that was not unlike the safety of a foxhole, and was a relief from the space everywhere on the farm—yes, outside, but also out the windows and through the doors. He could lie under the bed, staring at the woven ropes and the ticking of the mattress and relax. For some reason, he had not been allowed to do it very often—he couldn’t remember why. The rest of his childhood was don’t touch that and get down from there and watch out for the back end of that cow and don’t let Jake step on your foot and be careful of the ladder and there’s a trapdoor there and stay back from the planter and don’t go near that by yourself and if you get caught in a thunderstorm, lie flat in a ditch and, yes, in a high wind, the outhouse could fall over, and careful of the thorns on the Osage-orange hedge. Only under the bed had he taken deep, quiet breaths and felt safe. He held out his forefingers to Timmy, and Timmy grabbed them and pulled himself upward, and then, when he was sitting, and balancing himself against Frank’s fingers, he started crowing and laughing.

  1947

  WHEN LILLIAN WROTE TO Rosanna and told her she was pregnant again, Rosanna wrote back and told her that it was because she was bottle feeding rather than nursing, which surprised Lillian a little bit. When they’d handed her the bottle in the hospital and showed her how to give little Timmy his formula, they hadn’t mentioned that. Nor did they tell her that you had to add sugar to the formula in order to make sure his BMs were the right consistency. Lillian didn’t even mention this to Rosanna, but one of the best
things about rearing Timmy in an apartment rather than on a farm was that she could take care of him just the way she wished—she sterilized the eight bottles she would need for the day the night before, and left them in the enclosed sterilizer on the gas stove overnight. Then, in the morning, she measured the formula milk, added the sugar to the boiled and cooled water, mixed the water with the milk, and divided the total amount into eight equal parts, which she poured into the sterilized bottles. Just the idea of feeding a baby with the sort of water they’d had from the well on the farm, even in good times, gave Lillian the willies. And where would Rosanna have gotten evaporated, processed milk? Yes, Lillian herself had drunk milk from their cows (with the cream skimmed for butter, of course), but that she had survived was probably more a testament to luck than to anything else. And one hadn’t survived—Mary Elizabeth. Maybe Lillian had never known how she died; she certainly didn’t remember now, and she didn’t dare ask her mother. Possibly, she could ask Frank when he came again. These were the sorts of thoughts that occupied her while she was making Timmy’s formula for the day. And, of course, now there was pablum and applesauce and zwieback—he was a good eater. He no longer took a morning nap, but he went down fine in the afternoon, at exactly two, just like the book said, and at seven-thirty for the night, which meant that he was up by five, an hour before he was supposed to get up, according to the book. When she wrote and asked Rosanna about their sleeping schedules, Rosanna said, “Oh, goodness me, down up down up. The only one I remember is Claire, who slept like a rock in the front room. And you, of course. You were perfect. I don’t remember a thing before you. There was one time when I put Henry down and he was out the back door after something before I got there. I think he was almost to the barn before I caught him.”