Absorbed in her ruminations, Helen didn’t hear running feet behind her and was startled when someone whizzed by and snatched her crocheted hat from her head.
Billy skidded to a stop on the slushy sidewalk five yards ahead of her, laughing and waving her hat in his hand.
“A penny for your thoughts,” he called. “They must be deep ones.”
“How much for my hat?” she answered, as she came up to him.
“I’ll give it back only if you promise not to put it on.”
“You dislike it that much?”
He handed her the hat.
“It’s all right, I guess, if you don’t mind looking like an acorn. It’s warm enough, anyway, don’t you think?”
Helen stuffed the hat into a pocket. They walked side by side, turning off the commercial street onto a residential one.
“I told old man Benson he ought to put out some beach umbrellas next to the snow shovels, but he didn’t go for it,” Billy went on. “Where you coming from?”
“We were getting the gym ready for the winter dance tonight.”
“You going?”
“I have to. I’m on the decorations committee. I already told you.”
“Right. Guess I forgot.”
A chilly breeze had kicked up. Helen took her hat out of her pocket and pulled it down over her ears, buttoned up her coat. They turned onto their block. The breeze had brought in wispy clouds. The houses, white clapboard on brick foundations fronted by flat yards patched with muddy snow, had an air of desertion about them. It was an effect of the paling of the sun, and the emptiness of the sidewalks. The quiet neighborhood, like the featureless sea in Helen’s vision, seemed poised for some momentous change.
“Billy,” she said meditatively, “what could change the sea?”
“Change it?”
“What could happen to make it different?”
“The sea’s too big to change. Unless you mean a typhoon or something. You could say that changes the sea for a while. Bigger waves, high winds, lightning—things like that.”
“And thunder?”
“Yeah, sure, thunder. But thunder doesn’t do anything. It’s just noise.”
She nodded, unsatisfied. Billy started up the walk of his house, and Helen went on to her own.
“Say,” he called, “I’ll come over tomorrow, and you can tell me how the dance was, okay?”
The next day, Helen stood at the sink washing luncheon dishes while Billy and her father listened in the living room to a Giants football game being broadcast from the Polo Grounds in New York. Her mother and grandmother were at the church sewing circle knitting scarves and socks for “Bundles for Britain.” Helen was daydreaming at her task, once more turning over the ordeal she’d been through in front of McCutcheon’s window display. She still could make no sense of it. But a feeling of dread lingered.
When shouts came from the living room, her skittish heart leapt.
“Good grief,” she chided herself, “it’s only a touchdown.”
In the next instant, the swinging door slammed open. She turned to admonish Billy, but the look on his face checked her.
“Helen, come quick,” he said excitedly.
She rushed across the room, fearing her father had been stricken in some way. Billy followed close on her heels.
“We’ve been attacked,” he was saying behind her. “We’ve been attacked by Japan.”
At the threshold of the living room, she spied her father standing safe and sound by the radio. Belatedly, Billy’s incredible announcement hit her.
“What?” she said.
“At Pearl Harbor.”
“Where’s that?”
“Be quiet!” Walter commanded.
Helen and Billy went to stand beside him. There were easy chairs on either side of the big Philips, but none of them made a move to sit down. As they listened in horror to garbled reports of bomb strikes on American bases in Hawaii and Guam that morning, Billy put his arm around Helen’s shoulders. She leaned against him. Never before had they been so demonstrative in front of her father. Walter said nothing, not noticing or not caring. He kept staring at the radio, shaking his head. His rigid jawline showed how tightly he was clenching his pipe.
The newscaster was describing a scene of devastation and chaos. Fires raging. Dead and wounded sailors floating in the harbor. Hawaiian boys swimming through flaming oil slicks to pull them out. Civilian casualties in Honolulu, from both enemy strafing and Navy shells gone astray. Helen’s stomach churned.
“Dirty Jap rats,” Billy said, his voice breaking.
The reporter repeated again and again how the Japanese warplanes had swarmed in, some so low people on the ground were able to see the faces of the pilots and rear gunners. They had attacked in waves, first torpedo bombers, then dive bombers and high-level bombers. In two blistering hours, they had sunk or badly damaged eighteen ships, destroyed hundreds of planes, and killed thousands of Americans. Marines were being sent to look for Jap paratroopers in the island valleys. It was feared that California cities would be hit tonight. Parents in San Francisco were being advised to give their children identification tags in case of separation.
Helen began to cry quietly, tears sliding down her cheeks.
A local reporter came on to say that although President Roosevelt would not address Congress until tomorrow at noon, New York City and the nearby New Jersey cities of Bayonne, Jersey City, Newark, and Paterson were already on a war footing. Mayor LaGuardia had confined Japanese nationals to their homes and closed their social clubs and other meeting places.
“We’re in it now,” Walter said, reaching over and turning the volume down. “God help us, we’re in it now.”
“I’d better get home,” Billy said.
“I’m going to the church for my wife and mother-in-law. I’d appreciate it, Billy, if you’d keep Helen with you until I get back.”
“Of course, sir.”
Even as the two men conspired to watch over her, Helen felt oddly shunted aside, as if she were watching them through a closed window. They had somehow formed an indivisible unit, indivisible, at least, by her. She was glad not to be left at home alone, but she sensed that if she had wanted to be, they wouldn’t have allowed it.
But advice was what she needed more than protection. She was filled with fear, shock, and a strange kind of guilt, and no amount of comforting could make a dent in those feelings. Wait, she wanted to say to them. I have things to tell you. I heard the Jap planes coming yesterday. Yesterday. Thousands of miles from Hawaii. I saw the Pacific, though I didn’t know that’s what it was, and the reflections of sunshine on the sea. And I think I could have found out more. If I’d tried. Ought I to try now? But she could discover in their mobilization and unity no chink through which to insert her revelations and questions.
Next door, Mr. Mackey and Lloyd were sitting in the living room, leaning forward in tense conversation. They stopped talking when Billy and Helen came in. Nevertheless, their agitation was obvious, and Helen thought she detected something close to exhilaration as well. The radio was on, redelivering the same terrible news.
“I was just tellin’ Pop,” Lloyd said, jumping up, “he’s gotta sign for me so’s I can join up first thing tomorrow. Don’t want to miss the show. ’Course, there won’t be any problem for you, ya lucky slug.”
Helen’s whole body flushed hotly, and she looked quickly at Billy. There was nothing in his profile to reveal whether or not he agreed with Lloyd. She was possessed by an urge to grab hold of Billy, to force him to face her. She wanted to wrest his attention away from Lloyd’s wild talk. But his posture and his silence forbade such dramatics. Helen swallowed hard. As dazed as she’d been by the news of Pearl Harbor, she had not, until now, thought how it might reach into her life to touch her directly.
“We’ll talk more later,” Mr. Mackey told Lloyd. To Helen he said, “Mrs. Mackey and the girls are in back.”
Helen left the room. Her legs felt like they w
ere made of wood.
She found Mrs. Mackey sitting blankly at the kitchen table, a damp handkerchief clutched between her fingers. Barbara was at the stove making a pot of coffee. She greeted Helen with a warm hug. Perched on a stool near the table, Linda was licking a large, round sucker, her nose and chin sticky red. The women exchanged a few comments on what they’d heard and how awful it was and how awful it was going to be.
“Are the Japs gonna bomb us, Mommy?” Linda piped up.
“Be quiet, Linda,” her mother said.
“But are they gonna come here? Are they?”
Mrs. Mackey twisted around in her chair and gave the seven-year-old a resounding slap on her bare arm. The child dropped her lollipop on the floor and started to cry.
“I told you to be quiet, missy,” Mrs. Mackey shouted.
With great effort, Linda stifled her sobs. Her sister picked up the lollipop, rinsed it in the sink, and gave it back to her. The child judiciously slid her stool beyond her mother’s reach.
Helen was surprised at the outburst. She’d never known Mrs. Mackey to strike her children. It was a measure of her upset, Helen supposed. She felt sorry for Linda, but she was glad for the ensuing quiet. She couldn’t have said more or listened well. She kept imagining the bright, innocent Hawaiian morning with maybe people playing tennis or eating breakfast in a flowering garden or on the deck of a ship, maybe walking dogs and pushing baby carriages, setting out for church or sleeping in, when the noise of the bombers first boiled up. Like herself on Main Street, people must have been confused and curious, then unnerved. But unlike her, they had turned around to find death and destruction pouring down on them.
CHAPTER 18
That night Helen dreamed she was treading water in the inlet of Pearl Harbor, surrounded by men sinking beneath the churned surface, planes roaring overhead. Some of the men stretched out burned, blackened hands towards her, some only threw her anguished stares, but she knew that for all of them, she was the last of life they had beheld.
The strongest feeling that lingered as she lay staring at dawn light on her bedroom ceiling was a sense that she had let the dream-men down, not by being unable to save them, but in some other worse way. But what could be worse than not being able to rescue someone from death?
She walked through the morning at school in a fog. She had to keep pushing the desperate faces from her dream out of her thoughts. Some teachers were carrying on lessons as usual, but most gave the students a study period and didn’t scold if they talked among themselves. Helen spent those periods gazing out the window and humming to herself, locking her mind onto the nonsense lyrics of Hut Sut Ralston. At noon, everyone filed into the auditorium to listen to President Roosevelt demand that Congress declare war on Japan, which it readily did. Afterwards, the principal brought a Navy recruiting officer on stage. When the officer said it was not only the senior boys, but the sophomores and juniors who’d win this war, clapping erupted in several parts of the auditorium. Lloyd, seated at the end of Helen’s row, put his fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly.
Walking home, Helen tried to recall every detail of her experience from Saturday, the flash of the blank sea and the surge of engines. Her head ached with trying to figure out how she could have read a message there.
When she found her grandmother in the living room listening to the soap opera Life Can Be Beautiful, Helen sat down on the floor near her chair, waited for a commercial, then rapidly explained her dilemma. Ursula turned off the radio.
“So, this is a big question you are putting.”
“Questions, Nanny. Questions, plural. Not only what was it that happened to me, and what could I have done with it, but why me? Why leave something so important with me?”
“Such signs were probably not given only to you.”
“You think other people saw and heard the same things?”
“Or something like.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Because then it’s not all my fault. I mean, it’s not my fault that I didn’t tell anyone, that I didn’t give the warning.”
“But you did not understand.”
“Right,” Helen said eagerly. “So how could I give a warning?”
“Not understanding: that, maybe, is the fault.”
Helen drooped. Her own train of thought had already taken her to her grandmother’s position. There was no getting around the possibility that if she had continued to study with Ursula, if she hadn’t banished Iris, she might have been better equipped to understand the vague portent that had come to her.
“It’s a long time you have kept the world of spirit from your doorstep. Nicht Willkommen,” Ursula said, tapping her chest over her heart.
“I thought it would go away,” Helen muttered.
“Nein. There is too much Liebe.”
“Love?”
“How else do you imagine spirits can return but through love?”
Helen leaned back against the couch, tucking her legs under her skirt. She remembered the well-being she’d felt in Iris’s presence and supposed it could be called love. She remembered the gentle approach of Mrs. Steltman’s father, and the clear sense of attachment to the living that she’d gotten from both the crying little boy and the young suicide. And would she have received her visions of Mr. Mackey, or Lloyd, or Billy in the woods if she hadn’t had affectionate ties with the family?
“But what about the children in the Life photo? Or the sea and the noise the other day?”
“The spirits send messages like … like radio waves,” Ursula said, pointing to the Philips. “Where there is someone who can receive it, he does. If the radio is on, we get sounds, whether we want them or not. If we turn the dial, we clean the static, we have a better chance to understand.”
“You mean I’m a kind of radio, only I didn’t know I was on?”
Ursula nodded.
“Well, how do I work the dial?”
“You must begin again the seances. When the student is ready, a teacher always comes. For you, I think, are spirits already waiting.”
Helen didn’t like that answer, though it was what she’d expected.
“If I go to seances, will I know what it means when I see things? Will I be able to explain it to other people?”
“It is not like reading the newspaper. More like telling stories about pictures. And spirits can make mistakes. Just to be dead does not mean you know all things. But many spirits are very wise. We always hope for such ones to come.”
“If it’s so ticklish, why should I bother?”
Helen couldn’t help but feel petulant. Here were these spirits tapping her on the shoulder, interrupting her life, and when she was finally about to give them her undivided attention, they turned the game into hide-and-seek.
“You should bother because the spirits have chosen you. Because otherwise you will live with static in your ears and confusion in your heart.”
Ursula rose. She tenderly stroked the top of Helen’s head.
“And you should bother, Liebling, because now especially, in these black times, it is needed.”
Without waiting for a reply, the old woman left the room. Helen knew Ursula believed only one answer was possible. She didn’t need to hear it said.
The following evening, Helen was in her room doing algebra homework when the doorbell rang. She went to the landing and peered down to see who it might be. Her uncle stood in the foyer taking off his hat and coat.
“Marie and the children are fine, Emilie. I’ve come about something else,” he was saying.
“You should have called, Franz. Walter would have picked you up,” Emilie said. “It’s a cold walk from the train.”
Apparently he hadn’t been expected. Helen started down the stairs.
“Hello, Uncle Franz,” she said.
He looked at her without seeming to see her.
“What?” he said. “Oh, yes, hello, Helen.”
They went into the living room, where Ursu
la and Walter were sitting on either side of a well-banked fire. Walter got up to shake Franz’s hand. Franz had to say again that there was nothing wrong with his wife or children.
“I didn’t want to call,” Franz said, stretching his hands towards the warmth of the fire. “I didn’t want to take any chances.”
Helen took a seat at the far end of the couch. She was trying to be inconspicuous so that she wouldn’t be banished from this fascinating scene.
“Can I get you some coffee?” Emilie offered.
“No, thank you.” Franz smiled politely at her, but it was unconvincing, as if he weren’t quite sure how a smile worked.
“Well, let’s have it, then,” Walter said.
Franz stepped away from the hearth and put his hands into the pockets of his pants. He appeared to be gathering his thoughts, though it seemed to Helen that the trip from Brooklyn should have provided ample time to figure out what he was going to say, whatever the bad news, because, of course, it must be bad news.
“It’s my brother, Erich,” he said at last.
Helen had a vague recollection of Erich. His wife Freida and their two little girls had once accompanied Helen and her cousins and aunt on a trip to the Natural History Museum, and they had stopped by the garage where he was employed as a welder to bring him his lunch pail. Erich had a thick shock of white-blond hair, Helen remembered, and skin as pink as a guinea pig’s. Erich and his family had moved to Alabama last summer because he’d gotten a well-paying job helping build the Huntsville Arsenal.
“Erich was arrested last night,” Franz continued, “and this afternoon they came back for Freida and the children.”
“The children?” Emilie said, alarmed. “What do you mean they came for the children? Who came?”
“Erich and Freida arrested? What for?” Walter said.
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