The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  Inexorably, days passed. Then, amazingly, it was three weeks since the news of Billy’s death. Helen emerged from her daze and entered a dull, ceaseless ache scattered with sharp jolts of pain from out of the blue. Bing Crosby came on the radio singing “I’ll Be Seeing You”, and Helen burst into uncontrollable tears. Someone on the bus loudly gloated about the overtime pay at a munitions plant, and Helen had to get off before her stop to keep from shouting the woman down. A young man of Billy’s height and hair color and wearing the uniform of the Army Air Force crossed in front of her on the street, and she followed him two blocks, almost convinced that it was Billy, that some terrible mistake had been made and the boy they’d sent home in a box hadn’t been him after all.

  The fact of Billy’s death was like a new house Helen was learning to inhabit. In it, every ordinary action felt altered, every unconsidered routine foreign, every expectation challenged. She’d been evicted from herself. Billy had taken part of her with him, and that part would never belong to her again.

  Ursula and Emilie were careful with Helen, letting her dwell within her bereavement as deeply as she wished. They never brought up Billy, but if Helen did, they listened sympathetically to whatever anecdote she had to spin, sometimes adding their own small embellishments to her reminiscences.

  Walter was of the opinion that the best thing for Helen to do was to swallow her sorrow and put on a brave face. He never said so, but Helen guessed his position. If she got weepy at the dinner table, he’d quickly introduce a trivial topic of conversation. When he found her on the sofa rereading Billy’s letters, he set about cleaning his pipes, whistling softly through the task, keeping her company and wordlessly implying she ought not linger over the letters. One evening, he asked her if she’d cultivate the Victory garden this season, since Emilie was so busy with her Gray Lady work. Helen assented, and despite the listlessness of her response, he immediately plopped the latest Burpee seed catalog on her lap, and the very next Saturday, he turned the earth for the garden, making the plot larger than last year’s.

  Helen didn’t find more comfort in one way of being treated than the other. There were times when her mother’s tenderness and her grandmother’s patience were balms, allowing her to retreat into an inattentive state free of serious responsibility. At other times, the same coddling chafed her. Likewise, her father’s attempts to gently bully her into resuming some kind of normal life felt, in various instances, bracing and encouraging or cruelly dismissive and unfair.

  One thing everyone kept talking about was time. How time healed broken hearts and all wounds, how in time it’d get easier, how she wouldn’t feel like this forever, unmoored and raw. She wanted to believe them. She did believe them, in some recess of her benumbed mind that was managing to evade being smothered by grief, but it was difficult to get to that recess, and once there, it was difficult to stay for long.

  Every night after dinner, Walter spread out maps on the dining-room table. It had been more than three years since the United States joined the conflict, yet Walter still kept daily track of military events in all the theaters of war, drawing battle lines, recording dates and the names of generals and of towns and forests and rivers. Since Billy’s death, Helen had avoided going into the dining room during her father’s record-keeping sessions. She used to look in on him three or four times a week and let him update her. He always pointed out where people they knew were posted, though you could never be sure of anyone’s exact location. Letters from overseas came with headings such as “somewhere in Italy” or “somewhere in the Pacific.”

  Finally, one evening, Helen decided she wanted to see how it would feel to look at her father’s clean maps and listen to his battle summaries.

  “Helen!” he said, surprised, looking up when she entered the dining room. He had spread a map of the Pacific on the table and was anchoring the corners with beer steins from the sideboard.

  “What have you got tonight?” she said, walking over to the table.

  He stared at her a moment, then turned and pointed to an expanse of ocean dotted with two curving parallel lines of islands.

  “The Marshall Islands,” he said. “They’re all very small, but together they cover four hundred thousand square miles of ocean, and they’re key to our push towards Japan.” He tapped at one spot. “The Marines and the Infantry took this island, Kwajalein, a few weeks ago, and now they’re moving out from there to take the rest.”

  Helen sat down at the table.

  “Were many men killed?” she said.

  “No,” Walter replied. “The Marines learned some hard lessons on Tarawa back in November, and it saved lives in the Marshalls.”

  Helen remembered hearing about Tarawa. In three days, more men were lost there than during the six-month battle for Guadalcanal.

  “They bombarded Kwajalein much harder than they had Tarawa,” Walter went on, “both from the air and with naval gunfire, before landing any troops. They said the island looked like it had been lifted up into the sky and dropped.”

  What must it be like, Helen thought, to be under such bombardment. In this case, it was Japanese forces getting hit, and any fellow-feeling she had was mitigated by the recently released reports of the Bataan Death March, which had occurred two years ago, Rosie’s brother Jimmy had been captured in Bataan. If bombing an island so hard it looked like it had been dropped from the sky would move the end of the war one day closer or keep one American boy out of a prison camp or out of a hospital or morgue, she would stomach it. Still, it made her shiver. Horrible, she thought. It must have been horrible.

  Walter picked up a green pencil and circled three currently embattled atolls. In red pencil, he noted the Marine and Infantry divisions involved. He had other colored pencils for other designations, such as guesses at fleet locations, sites of sinkings, sites of amphibious landings. He was subscribing to two New York newspapers now, in addition to The Record, to glean as much information as he could. He knew that the more specific the information was, the more out-of-date it was. The details of future troop movements and even of current engagements were necessarily sparse. But his maps helped him place all the activity in some comprehensible order. It was his way of being a part of the war.

  He’d wanted to volunteer as a plane spotter for the Civilian Air Warning System, but Mr. Collins was in charge of River Bend’s unit, and he resented all things German, including his neighbors. Walter had taken classes in survival techniques during air raids and in first aid, but hardly anyone expected air raids anymore. River Bend’s blackout sirens hadn’t sounded in two years.

  “You know, Papa,” Helen said, “you ought to have a map of the United States, too.”

  “What for?”

  “For things that happen here.”

  Walter closed his pencil box and studied her a moment.

  “You mean like Billy’s accident?” he said softly.

  Helen nodded. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t.

  “And maybe, too,” she said, speaking quickly to hold on to her composure, “where the war plants are, or where the Army does different kinds of training. You could mark Crystal City and the other internment camps, and the relocation centers for the Japanese from the West coast, and the POW camps.”

  “It’s an idea,” Walter said, though Helen felt he was simply humoring her.

  “The war is here, too, Papa, don’t you think? Even though we’re not getting bombed, and we don’t have to eat tulip bulbs to stay alive like they’re doing in Holland, or have horses pull our cars, like in France.”

  Walter slid out the chair next to Helen’s and sat down.

  “The most important way the war is here or anywhere, Helen, can’t be shown on a map,” he said. “It’s in people’s hearts and in their faces. It’s in the way so many lives will never be the same again.”

  “Then why do you keep the maps?”

  Walter laid his hands flat on the map on the table and surveyed his notations.

  “It’s so big, th
is war. The men and the machinery, but also the ideas. You have to hold on to the bigness to see that winning is worth all the individual tragedies. Now that the other side is losing ground, when I make my marks on the maps, I actually get to watch the darkness being pushed back.”

  Helen nodded. She knew Billy’s death was part of something bigger, something necessary. He’d have been the first one to say so. But it was too soon and he was too particular and special a person for her to derive any solace from the thought that he had died in a noble cause, that he had willingly put himself in harm’s way for an ideal. Her head could call him a hero, but her heart could only count him stolen.

  Walter looked intently at his daughter.

  “If I could have spared you this, Helen,” he said, “I would have done anything, anything at all.”

  “I know, Papa.”

  He stood up then and busily unrolled his map of Europe, laying it on top of the map of the Pacific, lifting and replacing the steins at the corners. He took up the front page of the New York Times and looked back and forth between the map and an article about the campaign in Italy. He grunted. There’d be no pushing back of darkness on this map today. The Allies were still bottled up below the Gustav Line, where the Germans at Monte Cassino and the mountainous terrain and cold winter rains had been fiercely opposing them since mid-January. Even after Cassino had been bombed so heavily that the Germans were reportedly burying their dead with bulldozers, they were still holding on.

  Helen got up and left the room. It wasn’t important, really, she thought, if her father didn’t get around to adding a map of the United States to his inventory. The map that counted here was time. The conquest of hours, not miles or hills or beaches. Hours of waiting. Hours of making do and getting by and readjusting. Like everyone kept telling her. Give it time, they all said. As if “it” were a pet she had to feed. As if she had a choice.

  CHAPTER 35

  APRIL 1944

  Lloyd’s operation had failed. Tomorrow, he was being transferred to Valley Forge General Hospital near Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Barbara had told Helen he’d be there three months, learning to use the recently developed long cane and working on improving his tactile perception and manual dexterity and his ability to retain and follow verbal directions. Then he’d go to a new center in Avon, Connecticut. They were doing things there no one had ever tried with the blind before, teaching them to move about independently by using their hearing and other cues to judge distances and the location of obstacles. President Roosevelt had pushed for the program, insisting he would send no soldier home who hadn’t first received training to help him meet the problems of blindness.

  Helen stood in the hall outside Lloyd’s ward. She’d come to Halloran without having given much thought to what might transpire, knowing only that she had to see Lloyd before he left. That had gotten her onto the train and then the ferries. But now, just steps away from him, she faltered. What would she say? He’d sent no messages summoning her. They’d exchanged sympathy notes, personalized but formal. Yet in the past few excruciating weeks, when she could think only of her loss or of nothing at all, she’d been quietly aware that he was here waiting for her and thinking about her, despite his own grief over Billy, despite his feeling, as he must be, lost and alone. This awareness was a small piece of flotsam on a wild sea, but it had kept her from sinking more than once. She couldn’t let him leave thinking that she’d forgotten him.

  Lloyd was seated in a chair beside his bed. As Helen approached, she saw he had a small loom on his lap. His hands were unerringly weaving a strand of yellow yarn over and under a red warp. The rapid play of his fingers was so sure, she realized he must have done this many times before.

  She stopped a short distance away to watch him. There was something about the sight of him, so self-contained and intent, that relieved her. He didn’t look like someone who was weak or helpless or discouraged. Except for his dark glasses and the incongruous loom, he could have been any strong, handsome young man sitting expectantly in any room, maybe in a café waiting for friends to arrive for a jolly dinner, or maybe in some girl’s living room waiting for her to come downstairs and go out dancing. Lloyd loved to dance. Helen got the impression—though perhaps it was only a desperate wish—that no matter what, Lloyd was unquenchable. And if he could be, with all he’d been through and all he had yet to face, there had to be a chance, too, for her.

  “Hello?” Lloyd said in her direction. He’d sensed her presence. He kept at his weaving.

  “Hello, Lloyd.”

  His hands stopped. She saw him swallow.

  “Helen,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He knew her voice. She found that pleased her tremendously.

  She moved closer and perched on the edge of the wide windowsill opposite his chair. The top half of the window was open a crack. Cool air drifted in and touched the back of her neck. She recalled her first visit to this room and how she’d talked about the weather. How very long ago that seemed, yet it’d been only three months.

  “What’s it doing outside?” Lloyd said, as if he were also thinking of that first visit and their argument about the smell of approaching snow.

  “Oh,” she said, “a bit breezy. Cool for April, but not cold.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m getting out of here tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Come to wish me luck?”

  There’d been the tiniest bite in his tone. His chin was lifted slightly, the line of his mouth straight and serious, prim she would have said of anyone but Lloyd.

  “No,” she said.

  He smiled, but not fully.

  “I mean,” she amended, “of course I do wish you luck. But, really, I think I just wanted to see you again.”

  “You think?”

  “I wanted to,” she said definitely.

  “Good. Because I’ve wanted you to come.”

  They both shifted in their seats, as if some great hurdle had been crossed, or as if one were rising up ahead.

  “I guess you know all my news,” Lloyd said, pointing to his eyes.

  “Barbara told me. Sounds like you’ve got a lot of work in front of you.”

  “Yeah, well, better than staying parked here or on some street corner with a tin cup.”

  “Oh, Lloyd, don’t say that, not even as a joke.”

  “It’s what people think, though, isn’t it? That a blind man can’t do anything. I’m just saying it before they do.”

  He picked up the loom in his right hand and tossed it onto his bed. It was an angry gesture, but Helen noticed he’d reached out with his left hand first to gauge the distance and temper the force of his throw.

  “I wouldn’t say that about a blind man,” she told him. “I wouldn’t think it, either. Especially not about you, Lloyd.”

  “Hey, I’m no hero,” he said. “I’m going to Valley Forge and to Avon ’cause that’s where Uncle Sam’s sending me.”

  “Don’t you want to go?”

  Lloyd frowned in concentration.

  “The thing of it is, Helen,” he said earnestly, “I want it to work. I want it so bad, it kinda scares me.”

  “Scares you?”

  “When the operation didn’t take, it was like somebody shut a door and locked me out. For the first time, I really believed that I was gonna stay blind the rest of my life. But the crazy thing is, as soon as I knew there was no hope, I started feeling hopeful—not about seeing again, but about getting along as I am, about learning whatever they can show me. Because now I need it.” He wrung his hands. “But what if I can’t do it? What if I’m no good at it?”

  “Are there special requirements?”

  “You have to have good hearing. I suppose you have to practice a lot.”

  Helen reached over and put her hand on Lloyd’s wrist.

  “The Army must think you can do it or they wouldn’t send you,” she said. “I believe in you, too, Lloyd, for what that’s worth.”

  He
lowered his head, as if he were regarding her hand resting on him, then he lifted his unseeing gaze, seeming to follow the line of her arm up to her face.

  “It’s worth a helluva lot,” he said.

  Helen removed her hand and slid farther back on the wide sill. Lloyd rubbed his hands on his knees.

  “How have you been?” he said softly.

  He meant Billy, of course. She’d known it would have to come up. But the answer was so big, she didn’t know how to begin. Other people had asked her the same thing, in the exact same words, and she always managed to say that she was all right, or that it was hard but she was getting by, or that she didn’t want to talk about it right then. Such responses, while not false, were woefully incomplete.

  Coming from Lloyd, the query felt new and vast and very personal. She wanted to show him everything that was inside her, but she was afraid she might not be able herself to bear hearing all of it laid out together. She took a deep breath and sighed. Lloyd was waiting, but she didn’t feel his waiting as pressure. He was just there, like a burning candle.

  “What did you do yesterday?” he finally said. It was a starting place.

  “I took a long walk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was too muddy near the river, so I just walked through the streets, up around the high school and over by town hall. I didn’t really think about where I was going.”

  She had thought about Billy. She didn’t need reminders, but they were everywhere nonetheless—the high school steps, Benson’s Hardware, the hobby shop where Billy bought supplies for his model planes, the bridge over the railroad tracks where Lloyd had dared her, when she was ten, to walk on top of the railing. To Billy’s horrified amazement, she’d done it, but he’d become so nervous watching her that he’d wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her down when she was only halfway across. Yesterday, near that bridge there’d been a poster urging people to buy war bonds. It featured a drawing of a young soldier’s unsmiling face. “I died today. What did you do?” it said.