“He’s coming soon,” Marta told Helen as they walked across the lawn. “Then I shall move to the colony.”
“The colony?”
Marta pointed to the group of “victory huts” and their mess hall.
“You have a husband in another camp?” she asked.
“No.”
“You won’t have to be waiting, then,” she said. “The waiting is hard. Also the not knowing what is our future. That you will have.”
Helen’s negative reply seemed to have doused any remaining curiosity Marta had. She didn’t venture more questions.
They entered one of the brick residences. Marta took Helen through the dining room, which was furnished with tables set for four, and into the kitchen.
“We make our own crews for the dining room and for cooking,” Marta explained. “They bring the food and we prepare it. We can make requests.”
“Oh?”
“Of course. You can’t expect us to eat the same as the Japanese,” Marta said.
As they proceeded along the hall of the dormitory upstairs, Helen glanced into several rooms whose doors stood open. They were all identically equipped with one or two twin beds, a dresser, a desk, and a washstand. She spotted some individual touches—a few books stacked on the floor beside a bed; a flower in a vase; a large, framed photo of Adolf Hitler on a wall. When they arrived at her room, Helen was relieved to find she’d been given a single. She set down the satchel her mother had brought to Ellis Island.
Marta lingered in the doorway, counting silently on her fingers. Helen supposed she was checking that she’d covered everything she was supposed to.
“We have tennis and ballet, sewing machines, and more things,” Marta said. “You can go to the recreation building to ask. You remember which one?”
Helen didn’t remember, but she nodded anyway, hoping Marta would leave. Now that she was in her room—she was tempted to call it a cell, but that would only make her feel worse—she yearned to be alone.
“The Quakers come sometimes with music and lectures.” Marta spoke staring at the ceiling, concentrating on her recitation. “There’s jobs, too, but they can’t force you to work. Ten cents an hour. We get three-fifty a month clothing allowance. All in scrip. So we can’t save up to bribe nobody.”
Marta lowered her eyes from the ceiling.
“Herr Stangl is the Speaker for the Germans to Dr. Stannard,” she continued. “But if you want to complain about anything, see Herr Wiedemann in our building. He is who we elected to the Council. He was a Bund official. Very strong man.”
Helen nodded again. She’d briefly met Dr. Stannard, the camp commander, that morning. The woman had struck Helen as patient and respectful, which was close enough to kindness in a place like this.
Finally, Marta left, promising to return the next day with Helen’s slot on one of the meal crews. Helen immediately closed the door and sat down on the bed.
She took Lloyd’s letter from her skirt pocket. She’d had to let someone in Dr. Stannard’s office read it, but it had been returned to her uncensored. She’d already read it during the train journey, so censorship now would have been pointless, but she was glad nevertheless that none of it had been blacked out. It would have been painful to see it defaced. In the past few days, the letter had come to stand for all the sustaining connections in Helen’s life—Lloyd, because he’d written it, and her family, because they’d had the consideration to bring the letter to her on Ellis Island, and even Rosie, because it was through the conversation with Rosie about Billy that Helen had decided to hold the series of seances that had led her to Major Fitzpatrick’s office and ultimately landed her here.
She unfolded the letter. What a strange twist, she thought. In his letter, Lloyd had struck the pose of an explorer writing of a new world to someone secure at home. Yet here she was in a setting as novel and challenging, in its own way, as the one he was describing.
Lloyd was learning how to maneuver through the buildings and grounds of the hospital and through the streets, buses, and taverns of Phoenixville, probing and pushing against the limits of his blindness and against self-doubt. Helen, too, had involuntarily entered a kind of darkness, but in her darkness there were neither guideposts nor guides, Marta and Herr Weidemann notwithstanding. Lloyd had helpers and teachers. She had interrogators. The Army was trying to expand Lloyd’s freedom. The same Army had fettered her.
Helen smoothed the letter flat on the desk. Most of it was typed, Lloyd having dictated it to a Gray Lady, but the final paragraph was in pencil. The handwriting had the unsteady, careful quality of a child’s script, displaying an obvious effort at control. He explained, in the dictated section, that to write by hand he had to place a piece of corrugated cardboard under the letter paper and use the ridges of the cardboard to keep his lines straight. As he wrote, he followed the tip of the pencil with his left index finger, and when he finished a word, he moved his finger to the other side of the pencil point to create even spaces between words. It sounded like a laborious process.
Lloyd conceded he’d need to learn to write and read Braille. At first, he’d decided against it. He had enough else to master, he reasoned, and would simply rely on getting through that aspect of life by listening to talking books and getting people to take his dictation. But then he’d met a young amputee who was learning to read Braille with the stump of his wrist and another veteran who was using the tip of his tongue, so Lloyd figured he could and would do it, too.
The typed segment of the letter was full of stories like that. How you could tell if a lamp needed to be turned off by feeling if the light bulb was hot. How following a rubber mat in the mess hall with the edge of your foot led you to where you picked up utensils and food and where you dumped your garbage. He went on at length about his new plastic eye and how much better it was than old-fashioned glass eyes—lighter in weight, unbreakable, able to move from side to side, more natural-looking and better fitting. Helen couldn’t help but feel queasy at Lloyd’s pleased declaration that he could smooth away any irritations with a nail file.
She skipped to the hand-written postscript, which was phrased like a telegram, probably because of the concentration required to shape every word.
Am going to Avon early. Bunch of new guys coming here need beds. Grapevine says Avon tough as nails. Hope I’m ready. Still working on how to hold a cane. But can light a cigarette. Will show off when I see you again. Miss showing off. Too many champs here. Kidding. Regards, L.
Helen wondered if Lloyd had left Valley Forge yet. She didn’t know his new address, but if she wrote to Old Farms Convalescent Hospital in Avon, Connecticut, her letter would likely make it to him. But what should she say? She could tell Lloyd where she was, but not why. Would he think that the simple fact of her detention meant she must be guilty of something? Hadn’t she herself once thought as much of Erich?
What she wanted to tell Lloyd was how she was feeling—confused, fearful, lonely. She had downplayed these feelings in front of her family. They were already worried enough. Her father had sworn to take every legal recourse to get her released. There’d been several successful court cases where German-Americans had protested orders from the Army that they move out of their homes and jobs in restricted military zones. Helen’s wasn’t an exclusion case, but Walter held up these examples as evidence that her plight wasn’t hopeless. Helen had acted more reassured than she was.
She would go tomorrow, she resolved, to Dr. Stannard’s office and inquire when she could expect to be questioned again. Major Levy had said she would be. The sooner that happened, the sooner she’d know what was going on. Then she’d write to Lloyd.
Helen had spent many hours on the train going over her interview on Ellis Island. She’d become convinced that though her battle vision had activated Captain Fitzpatrick, it was not the real focus of his and Major Levy’s interest. The questions about her loyalty seemed, in hindsight, beside the point. She kept turning over the major’s parting words. He wanted something from her. B
ut what? Surely not merely another promise to restrict her seances.
A sliver of optimism perforated Helen’s gloom. When someone wants something from you, she thought, it gives you leverage, however moderate. You have capital to spend or trade. You are not defenseless. She opened her satchel and started unpacking her clothing and toiletries into the dresser.
The following morning, Helen was on her way to the commander’s office when she heard a raucous honking of car horns. Through the chain link, she spied eight automobiles speeding along, horns blaring in a jumbled medley, headlights flashing on and off. Three men in a convertible were standing up in the backseat waving small American flags and shouting. The drivers kept making U-turns so that they could pass the front gate again and again, then they finally tore off down the road, still leaning on their horns. Helen saw nothing but fields and pastures on all sides. The cars must have come from Dallas, where she’d disembarked from the train, or perhaps from some small farm town nearby.
Other internees had stopped to stare at the noisy motorcade. Their quizzical expressions made Helen think this was not a regular occurrence. Some faces showed alarm as well as bewilderment. Helen recalled reading about a murderously angry mob wielding hatchets and shotguns that had marched on a Santa Fe relocation camp for West Coast Japanese in 1942, when American troops were suffering terrible losses in the Philippines. The camp commander had turned the vigilantes away by convincing them that violence against the internees could backfire into the Japanese military mistreating or killing American prisoners of war. Yet the occupants of the honking cars at Seagoville’s gate had seemed more exuberant than inflamed.
Dr. Stannard’s office was crowded with staff gathered in a semicircle in front of a radio at the far side of the room. The clerk who’d registered Helen yesterday looked over at her when she entered, but the woman didn’t come to ask what she wanted. No one paid Helen any mind at all. She went to stand at the edge of the group to find out what was captivating them.
“It’s the cross-channel invasion,” a man whispered to Helen. She guessed he was a guard because of his Sam Browne pistol belt. “Started last night.” He pointed unnecessarily to the radio.
A stream of reports was being issued. Eyewitness accounts from reporters who’d dropped into France with paratroopers or landed on the beaches with the first or second wave of infantry. Bulletins from Berlin and London. Local reactions from all over the United States.
Seagoville was not the only place where motorists were sounding their horns and flashing their lights. Across the country, church bells were pealing, air raid sirens blaring, factories and trains blowing their whistles. But despite the excitement, the reporters said, the overall mood was solemn. Churches were filled with praying, weeping people. There were prayer services in offices. Stores were closed, sidewalks deserted. On Army bases, men stood in silent crowds around loudspeakers piping in the news. Tonight, the Statue of Liberty, dark since Pearl Harbor, would be lit for fifteen minutes, and at ten o’clock, the President would come on the radio and lead the nation in a prayer for their fighting men.
“The liberation of Europe has begun,” an announcer quoted a White House statement, adding his own enthused comment, “Brother, we’re on the road to Berlin!”
While more home-front stories were being broadcast, the guard leaned closer to Helen and filled her in on what she’d missed.
“They hit five beaches in Normandy,” he said. “The Brits and the Canadians are at Gold, Juno, and Sword, and our boys are at Utah and Omaha. Sounds like they got it the worst on Omaha, by a country mile.”
Helen’s heart jumped.
“Fooled the Jerrys,” the man continued. “They thought we were coming in at Calais, so they were better dug in there. They said Rommel was off at a birthday party in Berlin! Bad as it was on Omaha, it coulda been worse if they knew we were coming in there.”
“Omaha?” Helen said. “That’s a beach?”
“Well, it’s not what the Frenchies call it, I’ll wager, but, yeah, it’s a beach. More like a combination grave pit and junkyard now, from what they say.” Again, he indicated the radio. Omaha had just been mentioned.
Helen listened, frozen. It was late afternoon in Normandy. The troops on Omaha Beach had reached the cliff tops, and tanks were beginning to move inland, so the terrible shore fighting was over, but the reporter was recapping the morning landings. He was describing her vision—the falling and fallen bodies, the floundering landing vessels, the men pinned down on the sand by machine gun fire, the choppy, bloody sea, the whole cacophonous storm. Now, the reporter said, the beach was quieter—an occasional mine explosion, some sniper fire. Ships as far as the eye could see waited off-shore to unload supplies and more men. The next phase of Operation Overlord would be the taking of Normandy’s Cotentin peninsula, followed by a break-out from there toward Paris.
Yes, the beach was quieter, the reporter repeated soberly, and weary soldiers were moving doggedly on to the tasks of cleanup and build-up, but the wreckage of battle, both human and machine, lay about on every side. Burning trucks and jeeps, overturned boats, twisted wrecks that used to be mine detectors and portable radios, dead tanks, smashed bulldozers, rolls of telephone wire, bloodied shoes, writing paper, first aid kits, thousands of cartons of cigarettes, oranges, toothbrushes, family snapshots, life belts. And bodies—bodies arranged in rows and covered with blankets, other bodies as yet not collected. During the battle, the reporter noted, there’d been so many bodies everywhere, you could barely take a step. He named the divisions that had landed on Omaha. One of them was Lloyd’s. If he hadn’t been sent home from Sicily, he would have been there today on that horrific beach.
Helen turned and left the office. She wanted to sit out in the hot Texas sun a while and try to calm her mind, then find a chapel. There must be one somewhere on the grounds.
What had made her think she could prevent anything as vast and convulsive as Omaha? She’d strode into Captain Fitzpatrick’s office with such self-confidence. She’d felt so important. How like a silly, vain schoolgirl.
Why had she been given the vision? Or any of the messages she received? It was an old refrain, but one she’d lost sight of. Maybe here, locked away and alone, the answer would come at last.
CHAPTER 40
Marta had warned Helen about “barbed wire sickness,” the excruciating boredom and sinking worry that afflicted those who didn’t stay busy, so Helen quickly devised a routine. Each morning, before the day’s heat had gathered force, she walked the grounds. After breakfast, she helped out in the children’s classrooms, teaching conversational English. She spent the rest of her day in the weaving room, where she was working on a small rug. Some days, she had to put in time in her building’s kitchen. Marta asked her to join a group of women who were planning to put on a play, but Helen declined. She was trying to make the best of a bad situation, but she wasn’t ready to conceive of it as being a long-lived one.
The evenings were emptier. There’d been an open-air songfest once, where the standard Leiderkranz, or wreath of songs, was punctuated by Deep in the Heart of Texas and Home on the Range, both belted out with gusto. Another night, Helen went to a Hopalong Cassidy movie in the auditorium.
The movie show was the only time she saw Japanese internees up close. She studied them surreptitiously, curious about their appearance and their uniformly mild-mannered demeanor. These people had not been interned as part of the wholesale removal of Japanese and Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. If they had been, they’d be in a relocation camp instead of at Seagoville. Everyone here had been interned as individuals, for specific reasons. Helen caught herself wondering what their “crimes” had been, but as soon as she’d thought it, she felt ashamed. What had her crime been? Surely, she was not the only person interned on flimsy, circumstantial, or secret evidence. Marta informed her that the Japanese at Seagoville who were not from South America were language teachers from California, or were, like Marta herself, voluntary internees
wishing to stay with their spouses.
Except for the songfest and the movie, Helen stayed in her room evenings reading newspapers. For days after June 6th, almost every story was about the invasion of France. Advertisements had been dropped to make room for reports from Caen, St. Lo, and Cherbourg. Radio stations, too, had cancelled commercials. The radio in the rec room was on continuously, even though at times Helen was the only one there. She knew this was in stark contrast to homes across the country where people were sticking close to their radios and hanging on every detail of the dramatic, first-hand accounts of the fighting. She’d read that factory workers were so news-hungry, bulletins were being broadcast over loudspeakers on the factory floors.
Helen would have sought out the news in any case, but she had the added spur of a directive from Iris. Or her interpretation of a directive from Iris.
In her room on the night of June 6, still shaken up from having had her premonition about Omaha beach so exhaustively confirmed, Helen had called on Iris. Because she was nervous about entering trance in such an alien environment, she placed her chair against the door. If someone tried to come in, she’d be jarred, and simultaneously, her weight would impede the opening of the door, allowing her a moment to collect herself.
Despite her nervousness, Helen slipped easily into a light trance. The characteristic sense of well-being was restorative. Iris soon shimmered into view, surrounded by a pink mist.
“Iris,” Helen addressed her mentally, not daring to speak aloud. “I don’t know why I’m here—here in this place, and here in your company. I need guidance.”
“Here is the same as anywhere,” Iris answered.
“For the moment, yes,” Helen countered. “But I have to function in two worlds, not just in yours.”
“Mine is also yours.”
“Yes, yes.”
Helen fought down irritation. It would only disrupt her trance and cause Iris to be even more vague. She concentrated on cultivating the paradoxical state of being alert enough to interact meaningfully with Iris, and detached enough to let in whatever she might offer, especially the unexpected or mysterious. Attempts at interpretation should come later. This frame of mind was much easier to achieve when Helen was doing a reading for someone else, or when Iris had an agenda, like when she brought the newly dead soldiers. It was different now that Helen herself was seeking a message.
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