Mr. McCarthy, without a word, shuffled, then ran toward the exit.
“Michael!” his wife called after him. A shadow passed over her face. Then she sent it away as fast as it had come and turned to her son. “That man,” she said, a lilt in her voice. “He has the bladder of a two-year-old, he does.”
Helen knew that wasn’t why he’d taken off. She’d seen the look before. Hadn’t she had the same reaction the first time she’d walked onto the amputee ward? She couldn’t blame him. He couldn’t help it. Only now what was she going to do?
“Nurse Eberhart!” Nurse Becker sounded eerily like Captain Walker. “We need you here!”
“You can’t go,” Jimmy whispered.
Mrs. McCarthy was already getting a feel for Danny’s wheelchair, pushing it away from Hudy’s bed. “Let me see here. I think I can manage well enough.”
“Wait!” Danny’s panic was palpable. “We can’t go yet.”
“Nurse!” Becker yelled again.
Helen felt torn. She couldn’t push Jimmy and Hudy. But she’d promised not to leave any of them alone. Mrs. McCarthy was halfway to the ward doors already, with Danny turning back, panic-stricken. Betrayed.
And then Frank appeared, strolling onto the ward as if he’d been watching the whole thing and reading everybody’s mind. He took Danny’s wheelchair out of Mrs. McCarthy’s hands as smoothly as if she’d given it to him. “Hey, Danny. Bet this is your beautiful mother you told us so much about.”
Danny looked baffled, but he came through. “Sure is . . . Lieutenant.”
“Lieutenant Daley, ma’am.” Frank shook her hand as he turned the wheelchair and headed back to Hudy and Jimmy. “Would you rather push Danny or one of the other boys? We always go out in threes. Company rules. You know the Army.”
“I didn’t know,” Mrs. McCarthy said, put off balance for a minute.
“Nurse, if you take Jimmy, and I get Hudy, I’ll bet Danny’s mother can keep up.”
“Nurse Eberhart!” shouted Becker. “I need—”
“Thank you, Nurse!” Frank called to her. “We have things under control. Carry on!”
Helen grabbed Jimmy’s wheelchair and made for the door before Becker could stop her. “This way!” She led them to the service elevator.
“Yeehaw!” shouted Hudy.
They crowded into the tiny elevator, which barely held the three wheelchairs. Helen and Frank and Mrs. McCarthy stood in the back, squished together like Spam in a can. Risking a glance up at Frank, Helen mouthed, “How did you know?”
He wiggled his eyebrows. The elevator door opened, and he and Hudy were the first ones out. “Last one to the flagpole is a nasty Nazi!” Frank shouted.
It was late when Helen finished her shift and she and Frank left the hospital. Her feet ached, and she realized the only thing she’d eaten all day was a stale cookie. Frank had stuck it out through the whole wild visiting day. She’d barely said two words to him, but she’d glimpsed him across the room, visiting with parents, wheeling patients to the bathroom, getting cookies for kids.
Lightning bugs flashed as they crossed the grounds to her barracks. The twang of crickets faded in and out, like somebody playing with the radio volume. Helen looped her arm through Frank’s. “Danny and Jimmy and Hudy are amazing, aren’t they?”
“They are,” he agreed. “They better get those medals pretty soon—they earned them all over again today.”
It was funny—in a way, it felt like they were talking about their kids. The thought shocked her, and she hoped Frank had finished reading minds. “It’s pretty swell the way they stick together.” She laughed, remembering how serious they were about it. “The boys made a pact and made me part of it. I had to promise I wouldn’t leave any of them out today. I suppose Danny didn’t want the others to feel bad because his parents showed up and theirs didn’t.”
“That’s not it.”
“What?”
Frank smiled down at her, but even in the dark she could see how sad the smile was. “Danny was the one they made the pact for.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Hudy and Jimmy weren’t worried about not having family there. They made that pact so Danny wouldn’t have to be alone with his family. I’m guessing he wanted somebody with him who really understood.”
Of course. She should have seen that’s what was going on. Danny had been terrified he’d end up alone with his parents. Hudy and Jimmy made sure he didn’t. But how had Frank understood?
Helen glanced up at this man and wondered what else he understood.
Sunday morning, Helen slept past eight o’clock. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept in. Frank had probably been waiting outside for an hour. Chapel started in fifteen minutes. She hadn’t mentioned church to him, but he’d been there on Easter, her first Sunday, and he’d gone with her every Sunday since.
Pulling out the only clean uniform she had, she dressed, washed, did the best she could with her hair, and tore outside. “Sorry I’m—”
Helen stopped. The door slammed behind her.
Frank wasn’t there.
She glanced both ways, then jogged to the side of the barracks and peered across the quad. Soldiers moved in groups of three and four, but she didn’t see Frank towering over them.
Maybe he’d slept in too. Or maybe he didn’t feel like getting up for church. He’d spent himself on her ward yesterday, even though he could have taken the day off. The guy deserved a rest. Besides, it wasn’t like they’d made plans to meet. But a heaviness settled over her, and no matter how she tried to reason it away, she recognized it for what it was—disappointment. And not just a little, too-bad variety of disappointment. Not finding Frank waiting for her cut into her heart and scraped her soul, leaving an emptiness.
Don’t be such a dumb Dora, she told herself, setting off for the chapel. But as she walked faster and faster, she couldn’t deny that even her feet were in on the hope of finding Frank already in church.
He wasn’t there.
Helen tried to focus on the sermon, but the words swirled around her, just out of reach. She sang the hymns, but two minutes after closing the hymnal, she couldn’t have said what the songs were.
When the service ended, she stayed where she was as nurses and soldiers streamed out of the chapel. She scanned the little crowd, half as big as it had been on Easter, but she didn’t see any of Frank’s buddies.
An uneasiness was working its way deeper into her heart and mind.
He couldn’t be gone. Not yet. Not like this.
Hamilton, Missouri
June 21, 1944
Dear Frank,
Sounds as if the war in Europe may be over before you get there. I sure hope and pray so. I try to picture you with a gun, and I can’t. Boxing gloves, a baseball bat, an ice pick (like the one Daddy had to pull out of your hand after you and Jack played catch with it in the garage) . . . but not a gun. I never got a gun in the Philippines, so why should you? Which reminds me, have you heard from brother Jack lately? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that those meetings of the Big Three (although I still can’t believe we’re supposed to befriend Stalin) are really meetings of the Big Four, counting Jack.
The US State Department still isn’t taking me seriously. I have friends who feed me information about the “Bataan Death March,” as some refer to it. There were survivors. We think there may be hundreds in prisons, where they can’t get word out. I know that’s where Boots is. I want to go there and find him myself, but the Army won’t let me.
Take care, little brother.
Love,
Dotty
CAMP ELLIS, ILLINOIS
Frank lifted his Colt 45 and squeezed the trigger: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
“Not bad for a medical man,” Anderson conceded.
Frank squinted at the target some forty yards away. His ears were ringing, and his hand still felt the jolt of the gun. Sweat trickled down his arm, making his grip slippery. He’d never
even shot a gun before the war. “No bull’s-eyes, but at least they’re all on the target.” And Dotty couldn’t picture him with a gun? He should have brought his camera to war. “How’d you do, Andy?”
“I think I hit Lartz’s target once by accident. Otherwise, I’ve no idea where the bullets landed. Hope I didn’t hit anybody. Are these real bullets?” He turned his pistol around and peered into the barrel.
“Anderson, are you nuts?” Frank jerked Andy’s arm down. “Don’t point that thing at your head, you idiot!”
Anderson shrugged. “Don’t worry. I never hit anything I aim at. You, on the other hand, better watch yourself. If you’re not careful, they’ll send you into combat armed with guns instead of bandages.”
“If it would get me out of here, I’d go.” Camp Ellis had been constructed in six months, turning seventeen thousand acres of Illinois corn and beans into an Army Service Unit Training Camp, with over two thousand buildings, if you could call them that. Standing on the firing range, Frank could hear rifles to his left, machine guns farther out, and hand grenades exploding too close for comfort. To top it off, in addition to GIs being trained for the medical corps, signal corps, engineer units, and quartermaster troops, Camp Ellis was home to a couple thousand German POWs, all of whom received better treatment than the Americans. Thanks to the rules of the Geneva Convention, prisoners received pay for their labor—eighty cents an hour. So it paid, literally, to be a prisoner. And prisoner work shifts couldn’t go over twelve hours. Frank’s hospital shift was twelve hours, and field training, hiking, marching, and obstacle runs took up the rest of the day. It was inhuman. The artillery hill, where they were standing now, marked the halfway point of their thirteen-mile hike in full gear, and it had to be a muggy one hundred degrees.
Still, Frank would have gladly put up with anything if he could have had five minutes with Helen. His unit had been called up and carted out of Battle Creek like thieves in the night. And now they were incommunicado with the rest of the world. No calls or letters in or out. What if Helen thought he hadn’t cared enough to say good-bye?
“Her again?” Anderson reloaded his pistol with the resolve of a man threading twine through a needle.
“What?”
“The fair Nurse Helen? You get that look in your eyes when you’re thinking about her.”
“Then I must have that look all the time. If I don’t talk to her soon, I’m going AWOL.”
“Relax. Have you not noticed that what our ugly Camp Ellis lacks in natural beauty, it makes up for in beautiful nurses and secretaries?”
Frank hadn’t noticed. “I can’t get her out of my head, Andy. I can’t sleep because I keep seeing that face, those eyes. I miss her voice. Her laugh. I’ll bet she has a swell singing voice.” When he closed his eyes, he could see her walking beside him, her arm through his. She was probably a great dancer, the way she floated along effortlessly. The thought of her dancing with some other guy made Frank a prime candidate for a duodenal ulcer. “What do you suppose she thinks about me? I just left. I didn’t say good-bye. I didn’t tell her how I feel about her.”
“Patience,” Andy said. “In time, you won’t even remember—”
“Reload, gentlemen!” Sergeant Miller peered into Anderson’s face, a feat he could only achieve by positioning himself higher on the hill than Andy. Miller was a fireplug, short, with arms that made Frank think of Popeye the Sailor Man. Doctors entered the Army as lieutenants, an unfairness that had to gall career soldiers like Sarge. “And this time, Lieu-ten-ant,” he barked, “see if you can hit the target!”
“Don’t suppose you could keep it down, sport?” Anderson quipped. “I’ve a bit of a hangover.”
“Now!” Sergeant Miller screamed.
Frank was already aiming his next shot. He fired. Miraculously, he hit the center circle—not the bull’s-eye, but darn close. He grinned at the sergeant and got a snarl in return.
Anderson shot. Missed by a mile. Shot again.
Frank couldn’t watch. Sarge must have smelled liquor on Andy’s breath. Their first night at Ellis, Frank had gone with Andy to the on-site tavern. He’d nursed a beer while Anderson drank the way he did everything, with reckless abandon. Frank left after Andy’s fourth whiskey.
Every night they could hear Andy whistling or singing as he stumbled up the rows of barracks, identical clapboard shacks thrown together in a couple of days and filled with double-decker bunks that were little more than pillowless cots. It was a miracle he staggered into the right barracks.
Frank fired off the rest of his rounds, including the seventh in the chamber. He missed every shot. At least the sergeant wasn’t watching.
On the run back to the encampment, they had to trek through rough, wooded terrain, where they’d be practicing maneuvers, although Frank didn’t know why. It wasn’t like they’d be on the battlefield dodging bullets. Doctors would be in hospitals sewing up lads who failed to dodge battlefield bullets.
The unit looped around the small landing field, past the construction area, where engineering units practiced building barracks and bridges, and demolition units practiced blowing them up. Frank imagined walking this same route with Helen, talking about how crazy war made people, training them to build with one hand and destroy with the other.
He was second from the lead, only a few feet behind Sergeant Miller, when they reached the concrete posts and barbed wire that separated the POWs from the rest of the camp. A few prisoners were digging post holes or laying brick, while a dozen leaned against a barracks and smoked Lucky Strikes.
Frank was glad he’d never picked up smoking in med school because of his occasional bouts with asthma. Most of his colleagues smoked. Half of Andy’s paycheck went for cigarettes or drinks, and the other half to paying off his poker debts or incurring new ones. Did Helen smoke? He’d never seen her smoke. But most of the nurses did, calling it one of the few pleasures the Army allowed.
What about poker? He imagined teaching Helen to play seven-card stud, draw, high-low, buy-in baseball . . .
It was no use. He could try thinking of other things—the prisoners, Anderson, the war, even this never-ending run—but every thought led him back to Helen. He’d never felt like this about anybody. He’d had his share of dates—had even taken a nurse home for Christmas when he was a resident, but only because he knew his mother would like her.
Christmas. He pictured Helen decorating a tree, reaching for the top branch, needing his help—
Stop it.
“Lieutenant Daley!” Sarge was screaming his name.
Frank stopped running, suddenly realizing nobody was ahead of him.
“We’re through with the run, Lieutenant,” Sarge said. “Unless you feel like going again?”
“No, sir!”
Sergeant Miller shook his head. “Supper in five, and you losers better be smelling like roses!”
In five minutes, maybe seven, Frank was in line at the mess hall. About forty soldiers stood between him and what would pass for food. He was hungry enough to eat whatever they plopped onto his tray. He glanced back, gratified to see more soldiers behind him than in front, all dangling the same metal mess kit, which made food taste like tin.
Lartz let two soldiers in front of him so he’d be next to Frank. “You okay?”
“I can’t stop thinking about Helen.”
“Now there’s a news bulletin for the Stars and Stripes.”
“Tell me the truth, Lartz. Do you think Helen’s thinking about me? I mean, do you think she feels about me like I feel about her?”
Lartz grinned. “Yeah. I’ve seen the way she looks at you. Reminded me of the way you look at her.”
“Really?”
“Really.” They were up to the food now. Lartz stuck out his plate a second before the private ladled some goulash concoction onto it. Lartz stared at the brown pile oozing on his silvery plate. “Ever wonder why they bother dividing plates into three parts when the food ends in a glob anyway?”
&n
bsp; Frank received his mound of food and followed Lartz to the coffee. They had a long night ahead of them, and he’d need all the caffeine he could get. “Lartz, nobody knows when this war will be over, and you can’t put life on hold. Right now, this moment, that’s all we have, right?” He didn’t wait for a response. “If we weren’t headed into a war zone, I’d write Helen dozens of letters that would convince her I’m the only guy for her. We’d go to picture shows and get ice cream and meet each other’s folks and get to know the same friends. Then we’d both know we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.”
Lartz stared at Frank. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
Was he? Yeah, he was. He really and truly was. He’d known Helen only a few weeks. His mother would have told him he had brain fever. His father wouldn’t have said a word—just dropped his head with a disapproving shake. But the truth was, Frank hadn’t pleased his parents in a long time, not like Jack and Dotty did. He couldn’t name the moment when he’d given up trying to get his parents’ approval, but he had. Besides, they didn’t know Helen. Wonderful, beautiful Helen. “Lartz, I want to marry that gal!”
A grin spread across Lartz’s face. “Good for you! Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy . . . or a nicer gal.”
“And I’m not waiting on the Army for an all clear.” Frank’s heart pounded as hard as if Helen were there waiting to be asked. “Tonight, I’m going to ask Lieutenant Helen Eberhart to marry me!”
CAMP ELLIS, ILLINOIS
Frank was the first one to climb into bed that night. He tried to read the Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery Dotty had sent him, but even his favorite author couldn’t hold his attention.
Lartz was next to settle in. “’Night, Daley,” he shouted up at Frank from the next bunk over. “Think I’ll check in early.”
“’Night, Lartz,” Frank said, not looking up from his novel. He turned the page in case anyone was watching.
Anderson, of course, was nowhere to be found. He’d disappeared before Frank’s hospital shift ended. When they moved to Camp Ellis, Frank had been switched from working with disease patients and put on “minor surgery” detail—if you could call setting broken legs and removing gallbladders and appendixes “minor.” This evening, he’d removed a bullet lodged so deep into a soldier’s femur that nobody had realized it was there until the patient ran a fever. Maybe the fact that three other bullets had been removed in a field hospital had something to do with the oversight.
With Love, Wherever You Are Page 9