Dear Helen:
Hope you’re not too thick about my not writing, but I’ve been kept hopping the past month or two. In fact, I hopped all the way to Italy! Guess I better explain.
If there’s one thing all soldiers are good at, it’s rumors. Everyone’s always trying to guess where their unit’s moving next and when. Fellas even take bets on it, though that’s not saying much since most soldiers bet as often as they eat. Oftener, sometimes. We gals in Headquarters hear a good share of these rumors, as guys think we might know something of what’s true and what’s not. (We do, but our lips are sealed.) Anyway, finally a rumor came my way that caught my interest, which was that the Fifth Army was going to experiment with females in the field by letting WACs staff temporary headquarters just behind the front lines. You know I had to get in on that!
So we came to Naples, which is a nice enough city for having a week’s leave in, but still not the real goods. But now I’m in the field for sure. Our office is a tent with no lights, a few tables, a typewriter, barely enough paper. We plot troop locations, and requisition supplies and keep track of their delivery. When the troops move, we move, slogging through the rain and mud just like them, keeping six to thirteen miles behind the infantry. Between us and them is the artillery. You can hear the big guns up ahead day and night, both ours and the Germans’.
I have to tell you, Helen, that I have a sweetheart, and he’s an artilleryman. His battery has four guns. Like us, they stay in one place for stretches of time, so they get to make drainage ditches around their pup tents and lay them with straw so they’re dry inside. It’s been raining here all the time, which makes the hills a beautiful green, but you do get tired of being wet. The Army keeps promising galoshes, but they never come. Anyway, the artillery is not in as dangerous positions as the infantry, which helps me not be so nervous if Arnie’s safe.
Arnie Callendar is his name, from Des Moines. We met in Naples, when we both went to see the Pompeii ruins. He’s a heck of a guy, Helen, no fooling, and he thinks I’m pretty choice, too. Just talking with him gives me a lift. It’s like we know each other’s way of thinking before we even say it. It’s hard to explain, but he makes me feel more like myself. Even in ways we’re different from each other, I still feel like I can count on Arnie to let me be just me, and that that’s plenty good enough for him. I better stop now because I’m not making much good sense. It’s hard to get words around it. But probably you know what I mean, because how you and Billy are together must be the same. The truck’s here to take us to the showers, anyway. The guys mostly don’t bother with showers, staying dirty for weeks on end, but I’m not that much of a soldier yet.
Love, Rosie
CHAPTER 31
JANUARY 1944
Lloyd was barely into the second week of his furlough, with another week looming beyond that, and Helen was feeling that maybe it hadn’t been such a grand achievement to have talked him into coming home.
She’d visited the Mackeys on Christmas day with a Rita Hayworth paper doll set for Linda and a tin of homemade cookies, the product of weeks of saved sugar and butter. Lloyd said he wasn’t hungry and had been, on the surface, courteous, but there was a peevishness about him, as if he regarded the cookies as part of some scheme hatched expressly to annoy or insult him, in league with his sisters singing White Christmas and his mother repeatedly asking him if he needed anything. He’d arrived only two days before, so Helen put his mood down to weariness or a reverse kind of homesickness. It must be tough, she thought, to be in such a familiar setting and yet feel out of place. For that was what he most seemed, out of place, like a garish souvenir in a simply appointed room.
Barbara told Helen he’d let Linda lead him through the house once—it was a game to her—but he’d refused assistance from anyone since. Which meant that he either sat for hours in one spot or felt his way awkwardly along the walls and among the furniture, swearing under his breath when he stumbled.
Helen went to the Mackeys’ twice in the week after Christmas, intending to “spring” Lloyd, as they’d talked about in the hospital, but he declined both times and didn’t bother to give a reason besides not feeling like it.
“I’m worried about him, Helen,” Barbara confided one evening in Helen’s kitchen, as they sat sharing a pot of tea. She’d come over specifically to discuss Lloyd. “He’s not himself. I suppose it’s foolish of me to think being away at war wouldn’t change him, but, I don’t know, I didn’t expect this … this …”
“What?”
“Imposter comes to mind. Somebody who came home in my brother’s clothes, looking like my brother, but without his dash and zest.”
“Oh, I can’t believe Lloyd would ever lose that.”
“Well, then it’s in hiding. And I’m beginning to wonder if it’ll ever come out again.”
“His injury must be a terrible thing for him to bear, Barbara. He’s probably wondering what’s going to become of him now.”
“I know.” She sat back in her chair and hugged herself.
“He hasn’t told us any details about how it happened,” she went on. “He tells funny stories about soldiers in his unit, he’s got lots of colorful reports to give on Tunisia and the Arabs, and he’ll answer my father’s questions about battles in a general way, but I always feel like every story has another part to it that he’s leaving out and that those are the important parts.”
“What do you mean, important?”
“It’s like he’s in a prison, Helen. Those stories that he won’t tell—they’re the bars.”
Helen refilled their teacups. She was thinking about the men on Lloyd’s ward at Halloran and all the other men in hospitals at home and overseas. Were they all like Lloyd, trapped inside what had happened to them, going around in circles trying to find a way out, or maybe sitting and waiting for someone to point them to one? Whenever Helen worried about Billy, it was his dying she feared first, then a wound. She hated the idea of him torn and hurt, even if his wound were ultimately to have no lasting effects on his body. But she hadn’t thought about how a wound might injure his mind or damage his outlook, how it might take a part of him away from her. She’d imagined herself, sometimes, nursing him if he came home wounded, and she believed she’d be up to anything, but if he ended up like Lloyd, a stranger of sorts, what would she do about that?
“Have you tried asking him specific things?” she said to Barbara.
“Yes, but it’s no use. He clams up, or he gets angry. My mother made me promise not to do it anymore.” She sighed. “I wish Billy were here. Maybe he’d be able to get through to him.”
Helen knew that if Billy were home, he’d do everything he could think of to help his brother, and she thought that he’d expect her to do the same in his absence. But she couldn’t even get Lloyd out of his house.
“That’s not all,” Barbara said hesitantly.
Helen waited.
“Lloyd would probably be furious if he knew I was telling you all this …” Barbara took a deep breath, as if bracing herself before plunging into a cold lake. “You know what? I don’t care if he gets mad. It’s like he came home with a huge, horrible rat sitting on his shoulder, and we’re supposed to act like that’s okay—more than that, like we don’t even see it. Meanwhile, it’s eating away at him. It’s eating away at all of us.”
“What else is going on, Barbara?” Helen gently urged her.
“He has nightmares. He wakes up yelling almost every night. Can you imagine Lloyd frightened like that? My parents went in to him the first time, but he threw a fit, said he wasn’t a baby who needed his mother just because he’d had a bad dream. Now they don’t go in. At breakfast, we all pretend we didn’t hear anything. Even Linda has learned not to ask questions.”
Nightmares. Here was something Helen could understand without having to quiz Lloyd for details. The nightmares she’d suffered after Pearl Harbor had never recurred, but she could still vividly recall their terrifying images and the sucking reality o
f being detained within them. Additionally, the stories from her boys gave her some notion of what Lloyd might be seeing in his dreams. Maybe this was her avenue into his private fears.
“Do you think Lloyd would come for dinner?” Helen asked.
“I really can’t say. He might worry about spilling food. He’s actually quite accomplished at using utensils, but he might be nervous at a new table.”
“What if my father went over and asked him?”
Barbara considered a moment.
“That might work. I don’t see him being so rude as to say no to your father right to his face. But if he does come, what then?”
“I don’t have any great plan,” Helen said, not wanting to go into her history. “But maybe if he’s able to relax a little, maybe then he’ll start to let some cats out of his bag.”
Walter decided that an invitation to after-dinner drinks would be more acceptable to Lloyd, and he was proved right. Not only did he get Lloyd to agree, he also succeeded in escorting him from one house to the other on the appointed evening without affronting the young man’s pride. Helen reminded her father how Lloyd had insisted on hobbling around unaided after his bicycle accident years ago, so Walter was careful to let him decide how he’d manage. Lloyd used the stair railings to navigate his way down from the Mackeys’ front porch and up onto the Schneiders’ porch. In between, he held lightly to Walter’s arm.
Helen watched their slow approach from the front window. It was a bitterly cold and windy evening, yet her father was strolling casually and chatting amiably, for all the world as if they were on a garden path in balmy mid-May. Helen was pleased to find when Lloyd entered the house that his mood appeared untroubled. In fact, he seemed quietly gratified at the accomplishment of his small journey.
The cold January air had forced Lloyd into a civilian overcoat, but underneath, he was in uniform, even though it was a lightweight, hot-climate issue. Barbara had told Helen he was refusing to wear his own clothes.
Helen took both men’s coats and hats. Relieved of his outerwear, Lloyd stood almost at attention. Helen wondered if he were afraid of knocking something over.
“There’s a good fire going in the living room,” Walter said, raising a welcoming arm in that direction and taking a couple of steps. Then, confounded, he let his arm drop to his side.
Lloyd cocked his head slightly toward Walter’s voice, but remained immobile. Before Helen had a chance to decide how gracefully to maneuver him, Emilie came from the living room with a pleased exclamation.
“Lloyd!” she said, “it’s so wonderful to see you out of the hospital.”
As she spoke, she put her hands affectionately on his arm, enabling him to casually take hold of her elbow. The motions were smooth and natural on both sides.
“My mother’s impatient to see you,” Emilie continued, moving towards the living room with Lloyd easily in tow. “When is that rascal Lloyd Mackey going to decide to pay us a visit? she keeps saying.”
“Rascal?” He actually chuckled.
“Oh, you mustn’t take offense. With her, that’s a term of endearment. You are practically family now, remember.”
Emilie led Lloyd to a fireside armchair next to Ursula’s, ostensibly so the old woman wouldn’t have any trouble hearing him. Helen marvelled at her mother’s ingenuity. Lloyd might know he’d been managed, but Emilie had engineered it within such normal social forms, neither he nor anyone else found room for embarrassment. Helen realized that Emilie must have to deal with men’s disabilities and shame every time she went to Halloran. For the first time, she saw her mother as someone outside the family might, as a resourceful, quick-witted person of action.
Walter gave the women sherry and poured brandy for himself and Lloyd, apologizing to him for the lack of whiskey. These days most alcohol went into making explosives. Conversation moved from home-front news, including national affairs like the coal miners’ strike and catch-ups on which local men were stationed where, to theorizing about when a second European front might be opened in France, to descriptions by Emilie and Lloyd of the men on his ward. From this springboard, Lloyd introduced some of his experiences overseas. He avoided battle tales, except as framing references, such as, “I saw my first scorpion on the day before we met the panzers at the Kasserine Pass,” and “There was a big air raid the night Bob Hope’s troupe played for us.” They all laughed at a long story about three GIs in Sicily bartering cigarettes and candy for wine and wonderfully ripe tomatoes, stuttering in pidgin Italian, flailing about with elaborate gestures, only to find that the peasant they were negotiating with had lived in Buffalo for eight years and spoke very passable English.
There was a lull after their laughter died out. It was a comfortable quiet. They sipped their drinks. Then Walter carefully asked Lloyd what invasion day in Sicily had been like. Helen thought that risky, despite the fact that Lloyd’s wounds had come later in the campaign. But Lloyd didn’t bark out an intimidating reply, as he might have done at home. He leaned his head against the high, padded back of his chair and seemed to reflect.
“Well, to start with,” he said, “getting there was some show. There were two thousand ships, half ours, half the Brits’—cruisers, destroyers, PT boats, sub chasers, troop transports, assault craft, barges carrying tanks—ships as far as you could see on all sides. And planes in formation overhead.”
He paused, remembering the awesome sight.
“That first day was beautiful—the Mediterranean calm as a pond—but at night a big storm came up. Screaming wind, waves over the deck. The ship was up and down, rolling from side to side. We just about turned green, we were so seasick. If we’d got dumped on the beaches in that condition, a gang of first-graders could’ve whipped us.”
“How long was the storm?” Ursula said.
“All night. All the next day. And that was the day we were supposed to land.”
“What did you do?” Helen asked, caught up in the tale.
“We landed.”
“But if you were all sick—”
“That night the storm quit cold. They took us in just before dawn. We were straight enough by then. We had to be.”
Lloyd’s tone of voice had shifted. Helen could tell he was done.
“Was it a tough fight?” Walter said.
Lloyd swallowed the last of his brandy.
“Been in tougher,” he replied. Then he held out his empty glass. “Could I get a refill, sir?”
As Walter was obliging Lloyd, Emilie stood up.
“If you’ll excuse me, Lloyd,” she said, “I have to be up early tomorrow to go to the hospital.”
“Tell the fellas hi for me.”
“Of course.”
“Time for me, too,” Ursula said. She crossed to Lloyd and rested her hand on his shoulder. “Come back tomorrow at lunch, and I give you some sauerbraten. You’ll be surprised how good it is from mutton. Better than the horse meat.”
“As you can tell, Lloyd, the beef shortage has made for some adventurous cooking around here,” Walter said.
Emilie signalled to her husband that he ought to exit, too. She knew Helen had hoped for some time alone with Lloyd. Walter lingered ten minutes after Emilie and Ursula had left, then excused himself with the claim he had some accounts to go over for a deadline the next day. Helen moved to her grandmother’s chair to be closer to both Lloyd and the fire. For several minutes, they didn’t speak. Helen was beginning to feel sleepy. Maybe she shouldn’t try to draw Lloyd out any more tonight, she considered. Maybe enough had happened for the time being.
“So when are you and my big brother getting hitched, anyway?” Lloyd blurted.
Helen felt herself blushing. Silly goose, she thought.
“When he’s done with his training at the end of February. He should get a couple weeks’ furlough then, before he gets posted somewhere.”
“He’ll probably be attached to a bomber crew, you know.”
“I know.”
“But maybe cargo.”<
br />
Helen really didn’t want to speculate about Billy. Speculation could so quickly turn into apprehension.
“He shoulda stayed at the factory,” Lloyd said, the simple opinion edged with exasperation.
“He didn’t want to. He couldn’t.”
Lloyd leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Yeah, I know all about that,” he said. “You wanna look brave. Hell, you wanna be brave. But it doesn’t turn out like you think.”
Helen missed not being able to peer into Lloyd’s eyes. She’d never realized before how much can be learned about a person’s feelings that way, how many words can be dispensed with by a look.
“Are you sorry you went?”
“Nah. It was the right thing. It’s a war that’s gotta be fought. But I’d still like to see Billy miss it.”
“What was it like, Lloyd?”
He slowly shook his head.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I think I would.”
“No, you wouldn’t!” he snapped. “You weren’t there.”
Lloyd had been in North Africa for eight months, six of those months in combat with the Germans. Helen searched her memory for desert stories from her boys.
“It’s hot, right?” she said. “There’s constant noise from trucks and planes and guns. You’re dirty all the time, and sometimes you don’t get enough to eat or the food is bad. You walk and fight, walk and fight, day and night. You’re scared sometimes, but what’s worse is being exhausted. Exhausted and bored and sick of it. But it keeps going, and you do, too, somehow. You just walk and fight.”
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