“Wanna take a walk?” he said.
He didn’t need to name where. He could only mean the tree house he and Lloyd had built years ago in the woods behind Dohrmann’s field. Helen thought of it as their place now, hers and Billy’s, even though the single-minded Lloyd occasionally brought girls there, including, two or three times, the detestable Beth of the yellow sash, who had become less detestable to Helen after Lloyd’s conquest of her. Helen and Billy used the tree house for rainy day picnics and star-gazing. They also regularly achieved dizzying heights of pleasure in that crude structure of scrap lumber and branches, but so far, by mutual agreement, they’d stopped just short of crossing the line Lloyd had erased.
“It’ll be getting dark soon,” she said.
“Even better.”
She rolled up the pages of automatic writing, stuck the scroll between her belt and the waistband of her skirt, and turned to leave the yard, relishing the few seconds he stayed behind, imagining his appreciation of her gait. When he fell in step beside her, there was no more talk of spirit stories or differences.
Helen was careful not to bring up the soldier spirits again with Billy. She stopped attending her grandmother’s seances, and she cut back her own work with the home circle to one seance every other week, hoping to lessen the hold of “her boys” on her thoughts. But she was still enthralled by their messages, and she still derived a visceral pleasure from the process of automatic writing. To pretend that this wasn’t happening or that it didn’t mean enough to her to talk about it made her, at times, feel hollow and almost fearful in Billy’s company. His outlandish likening of her mediumship to her having another beau had come to fit, in that she grew nervous at lapses in conversation and felt false when she rushed to fill them with inconsequential chatter, as if she really did have an amorous transgression to hide.
It used to be that something inside of her lit up when Billy arrived at her door or called over the fence, or even when she caught sight of him from her window painting one of his models at the workbench in his yard. This had not gone, but now she was likely to experience foreboding, too.
Fortunately, their physical relationship remained untainted. Their bodies possessed superlative knowledge of each other. Every kiss, every touch beguiled and entreated. They pounced on any opportunity to be alone. Billy so regularly loosened Helen’s clothing, she took to wearing shirtwaist dresses that buttoned all the way down the front to make the task easier.
One day, she went to Bamberger’s and bought a lacy, powder blue silk slip. It was the most expensive item of clothing she’d ever owned. The supply of silk from Asia had been cut off by the Japanese, and what silk there was had to go into parachutes. Bamberger’s had a huge barrel near the front door for women to deposit old silk blouses, scarves, and stockings. There was a barrel for nylon stockings, too. Nylons could be refashioned into tow ropes for military gliders and powder bags for naval guns.
The collection barrels made Helen feel a little guilty at her indulgence. Posters, billboards, and radio spots repeatedly admonished everyone to conserve resources. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Yet, she reminded herself, other ad campaigns insisted women should continue to wear make-up and look pretty to keep up morale. On the bus ride home, the slip stuffed into a zipper compartment of her handbag, Helen fluttered in anticipation of Billy’s reaction.
Billy had groaned in delight when he saw her in the slip. Later, when they lay happy and expended in each other’s arms in the tree house, he told her about a letter from Lloyd, who was training in England. He’d written that to mark the United States’ entry into the war, girls there were wearing slips with little American flags embroidered on the hems and on the cloth between their breasts. Despite the popular British song, You Can’t Say No to a Soldier, Lloyd insisted that he’d seen these slips only in shop windows, but Billy was sure that was to keep from unnerving their mother.
“Lloyd doesn’t like Ma fussing and brooding over him,” Billy said. “He’s said so right out to her, sometimes not too kindly, but I guess from thousands of miles away, he can afford to be more tenderhearted with her.”
“I wonder if your mother fusses because Lloyd is so wild, or if it makes Lloyd wild because she fusses.”
“Both, I think. But they’re each mostly being their natural selves. Ma’s always favored Lloyd, and Lloyd has always gone his way and fought anybody keeping him down. Even when Pop was gone, we couldn’t rely on Lloyd.”
“But he helped, didn’t he? He had that paper route. He worked around the house?”
“Only when he decided. Never if Ma wanted it, or if he thought I was asking for her sake.”
Billy sat up, the signal it was time to prepare to go home.
“You know the maddest I ever saw Lloyd?” Billy said as he was buttoning his shirt. “Once we were wrestling, and I threw a blanket over his head and held him tight in it.” Billy shook his head at the memory. “He fought like a trapped tiger.”
“What’d you do?”
“I had to let him go. He actually scared me, he was so angry. He’s not one to stand against when he has a mind to go ahead.”
They finished straightening their clothing and climbed down the ladder of the tree house. A clump of lily-of-the-valley was growing at the base of the tree. Helen picked a sprig and put it in her top buttonhole. She wanted to remember this afternoon because it had been the debut of the slip, and because it was getting to be a rare thing to have more than an hour to spend with Billy. The federal government had built a huge new plant for Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical in Wood-Ridge, and Billy had been transferred there. He was working most of the time, and collapsed in sleep when he wasn’t.
Air Marshal Goering had said American industry was good at making refrigerators and razor blades, but they couldn’t make airplanes. But all over the country, old plants were refitting and new plants were being built, hurrying to produce planes, locomotives, jeeps, munitions, trucks, tanks, ships, and all their related parts. Billy’s plant made engines for B-17s and B-29s. Elevator manufacturers were now making landing gear and gun turrets, optical plants were producing bombsights. Prisoners at San Quentin were making antisubmarine nets and nightsticks. No civilian automobiles had been made since early February, nor any new bicycles, and none were planned. Only six months after Pearl Harbor, what had been pastureland outside Detroit was now a Ford factory a half mile long. Raw materials went in one end and came out the other end as a long-range bomber ready to fly.
Given Helen’s new sense of unbalance, Billy’s shortage of free time was actually a boon. She was easier when their time together was measured. They were more likely to spend it necking, which banished any hesitations either of them had about the other. If they didn’t talk, they couldn’t disagree.
CHAPTER 23
JUNE 1942
Helen’s graduation was a low-key affair. Lloyd was not the only boy who had left school to join the Armed Services, and their classmates decided to leave empty chairs on the stage in the alphabetical places where they should have been seated. There was one such chair next to Helen, with a rectangle of oak tag taped to it lettered with the name Michael Scully. Mike was training in Colorado with the Tenth Mountain Division, learning to fight on skis.
The principal read a list of past graduates who’d lost their lives, most in the Pacific, including two in the recent Battle of Midway, the first big victory against Japan, and it was impossible not to wonder how many of the boys on stage would also leave and never come home. Helen had spotted a few gold-starred flags in people’s front windows, indicating a family member had died in the service. You didn’t need to be psychic to know the number of those flags would be increasing, as would the number of flags with blue stars. There was even one such banner in a window of the White House. It had four blue stars, one for each Roosevelt son in the military.
As the valedictorian droned on about the grave responsibility of this graduating class to save the world from fear and evil, He
len surreptitiously laid her hand on Mike’s empty chair. She received no intimations of what lay ahead for him. Such premonitions were rare for her, but they did come, especially now when men in uniform were encountered daily in every public place. She’d gone a few times with Rosie and other girls and women to take baked goods to the troop trains stopped at the water tank at the south end of town, and it took only a brush against a uniform sleeve as some boy reached out the train window to take a donut from her tray, for Helen to get a flash image of that arm blown off and lying beside him on a muddy battlefield. She met twenty or thirty soldiers for every one that presented her with a vision, and the visions were not always gruesome, such as the time she saw a shy farmer from Iowa lifting the skirt of his first woman in a dark, cobblestoned alley. But the possibility of a disturbing mental ambush was always there.
She never told anyone of these seeings, not even her grandmother, who would have scolded her for not keeping her abilities in closer check. Helen believed it wasn’t right to try to prevent the premonitions. It seemed her own particular brand of sacrifice for the war effort. Those boys, so jocular and flirtatious as they crowded at the train windows, were actually going to have to face what she foresaw, and more. How could she presume to protect herself from merely seeing it for a moment? Still, she didn’t dare join the bus trips to the USO canteens at Camp Kilmer and Fort Dix, where she’d have to dance with soldiers. What more thorough visions might such contact provoke?
Emilie had offered to host out-of-state soldiers for Sunday dinner, so once in a while there’d be two or three green privates at the table, politely conversing with Walter about war news or their hometowns, praising Emilie and Ursula’s cooking, smiling at Helen as she leaned to clear their plates. Luckily, only one young man so far had provided her with dire foreknowledge. She saw him lying in the arms of another soldier, his chest covered with blood, his eyes glazed with pain and bewilderment. She found some comfort in the discovery that just before he died, the grime and noise around him would disappear from his awareness and he’d believe he was reclining on the grass in his West Virginia backyard watching his little son toddle after a butterfly, the scent of freshly baked cherry pie wafting from an open window in the tidy white house behind them.
Strangely, Helen’s certitude that after his dying agonies he’d attain peace and a new kind of existence was less consoling than that he’d have that final glimpse of earthly contentment. The stories of “her boys” had not lost power for her, but they couldn’t assuage the tragedy of too many people dying too young.
Being at the latter end of the alphabet, Helen was one of the last to receive her diploma. Soon after she’d resumed her seat, the class stood to sing the alma mater, followed by God Bless America and The White Cliffs of Dover, which the graduates had chosen because it recognized the current plight of the world yet managed to be hopeful. The song had been recorded by five different big bands and their singers, and all had been Top-Twenty hits, Kay Kyser’s making it to number one.
Ursula had badgered her, Walter and Emilie had granted their consent, and Billy had stopped short of forbidding her, but it was Rosie who finally convinced Helen to begin taking clients at seances.
A week after graduation, Rosie and Helen were pulling wagons door-to-door, collecting scrap metal to bring to a depot at the Elks Lodge. The Elks had affixed placards to each wagon. Rosie’s placard urged “Slap the Jap with the Scrap,” while Helen’s cheerily asserted “Praise the Lord, I’ll Soon Be Ammunition.”
Housewives pulled odds and ends out of garages and cellars to give to the girls. One woman proudly presented them with a stack of washed, flattened tin cans she’d gathered from her neighbors. After only two blocks, one wagon was nearly full.
Turning up the next sidewalk, they spotted a woman only a few years older than they hanging laundry in her side yard. Most of it was diapers. A fat baby sat on the grass gnawing a piece of zwieback, his chin smeared with wet crumbs. The woman turned towards the girls. She removed a wooden clothespin from her mouth and put it into her apron pocket. Her face evinced only mild curiosity.
Helen made an admiring comment about the baby, which failed to produce the customary maternal smile, and then Rosie launched into a brief spiel about the salvage drive, winding up with the impressive announcement that the town of Englewood was even tearing up its trolley tracks to donate.
“Sorry,” the woman said, bending to lift another diaper from her basket. “We got nothin’ here.”
“Not even newspapers?” Rosie said. “We’re not collecting those, but you can leave them on the curb first Sunday of every month, and someone will come by for them.”
“Don’t read newspapers,” the woman said, continuing her chore. “Don’t need newspapers to know the world’s in a jam.”
Rosie threw Helen an exasperated glance.
“You don’t have to give anything big,” Helen said. “Most people are surprised what they’ve got laying around.”
“Like razor blades,” Rosie suggested. “Did you know twelve thousand razor blades can make a two-thousand-pound bomb?”
“Don’t have twelve thousand razor blades.”
“Well, of course not,” Rosie said, an edge coming into her voice.
Helen pulled her wagon closer to the woman.
“Just look at what we’ve gotten so far,” she said. “Maybe you have something of the same kind? Like this old iron shovel. This shovel can be converted into four hand grenades.”
The woman glanced briefly at the contents of the wagon, then shook her head. From an upstairs window came the sound of a young child crying. The woman looked up, squinting against the sun.
“My other boy’s awake,” she said. “And I got dinner to start.” She picked up the baby and started to walk away. She hadn’t finished hanging the laundry. As irritating as the woman had been, Helen had the urge to do the job for her.
“Don’t forget to save your used cooking fat,” Rosie called after her. “The butcher will buy it when you’ve got a pound.”
The woman didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard Rosie, though the baby graced them with a gummy grin from over his mother’s shoulder. The screen door slammed behind them.
“Let it lay, Rosie,” Helen said, seeing her friend was tempted to follow.
“I was just gonna tell her how the glycerine in one pound of fat can make a pound of powder for bullets.”
“She doesn’t want to know.”
“If those boys were bigger, she’d want to know all right.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“I’m gonna leave her a booklet anyway,” Rosie said. She put a copy of A Kitchen Goes to War on the worn welcome mat at the front door.
They’d been giving everyone the free booklet of recipes for meatless dishes and sugarless desserts. There were no serious shortages of food in the United States, as there were in Britain and Europe, but the federal government had set ceilings for food prices and distributed ration books to everyone, even children. So far only sugar was being rationed. Meat was still unrestricted, but people were being asked to cut back to guarantee that the troops would be well-fed.
“Do you plan to stop by Tuesday to see if you can smell a pot roast cooking?” Helen teased. Observing “meatless Tuesdays” was considered a patriotic act.
“I just might,” Rosie replied, smiling.
After the girls had delivered their loads and received the list of the next day’s addresses, they went to the library square and sat on a bench watching the fountain splash in the sunshine. A nearby kiosk, in the past posted with minutes of civic meetings, announcements of church social events and bake sales, and offers of free kittens, was now plastered with war-related posters. A handsome pilot grinned on a recruiting poster declaring “Fly to Tokyo, All Expenses Paid.” A man in a suit stood admiring a woman dressed for factory work in a kerchief and overalls as she announced “I’m Proud: My Husband Wants Me to Do My Part.” And emblazoned across a drawing of two tall red gasoline pump
s was the reprimand “When You Drive Alone, You Drive with Hitler.”
“My mother told me Mary Steltman’s gotten a job at Bendix making instrument panels for planes,” Helen said pointing to the poster of the woman worker.
“Old whining Mary? I wouldn’t think she had it in her.”
“Even Mary must’ve figured out nobody wants to hear whining these days.”
Rosie walked over to the kiosk and studied the poster with the pilot.
“You heard about that new Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna join.”
“Really?”
Rosie turned to her friend. “Really.”
“Gosh, what’ll you do, do you think?”
“Whatever they tell me. The idea is to do things like office work and driving trucks and making maps so the guys can go fight. But I hope I get an overseas assignment.”
“What about your folks? With your brothers already in it, will they let you go, too?”
“They can’t stop me, Helen.”
One look at Rosie’s face would convince anyone she was immovable. But Helen knew her well enough to spy a tiny flicker of uncertainty in her defiant eyes. Some part of her wanted approval, even though not getting it wouldn’t prevent her following through.
“Have you told them?”
Rosie nodded.
“What’d they say?”
“My mother never says much about anything. She took it pretty good, said I was grown now, and she supposed I could make up my own mind. And my father … he … well, he kind of laughed, but not in a way like when something’s funny. He just laughed, and then he stopped short, like he was gonna cough or spit, and then he said … he said he already had enough sons.”
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