by Nancy Jensen
“Daisy, get down from there!” Mabel dropped the mail on the kitchen table and lifted her hands to urge Daisy off the chair she was standing on. She had set all the jars on the counter and was now stretching to reach the far corners of the shelf with a cloth.
“Let Barry do that,” Mabel said. “You’re nearly five months. You’re liable to fall.”
When Daisy turned to look at her mother, her gaze shifted to the copy of Life, which had landed faceup on the table. “I’ll get down if you promise me you won’t look at that magazine. You know how upset you get.” Daisy did not approve of Mabel’s project, and each time she saw a new set of photographs, she said, “Please be careful, Mama. Don’t get too involved with these guys. Think how terrible it will be for you if you find out any of them have been—”
“You can’t protect yourself from loss,” Mabel said. “You know that as well as anybody.” Still, she understood what Daisy was really afraid of. In the last twelve years, ever since her breakdown in the Juniper cemetery, Mabel had fought through three or four bouts of depression—weeks at a time, when she was incapable of pulling out from under black despair. The last one had been set off in late summer by a report on the news showing American soldiers burning a village in Vietnam. Mabel couldn’t take her eyes off the television—the flames, the smoke, and the masses of terrified people, Morley Safer talking through it all. For days afterward, she refused to miss the news, read every newspaper and magazine story about that terrible act, haunted by the way Safer had put the fire in context: “A man lives with his family on ancestral land. His parents are buried nearby.” And as if she had seen it all, Mabel imagined those people, suddenly homeless, displaced from families, wandering in desperate search of one another. As a girl, she had believed she would live out her life in Juniper, tending the graves of her parents, and one day marry and have children who would tend her grave. Before long, though she knew she should be concentrating her sympathy on those poor Vietnamese, her mind locked on Juniper and the way it was when she had last seen it—nothing but charred shells of places she had known—and then her mind slipped to why she had gone there, and how she had failed. The next morning, she just couldn’t get up, though Daisy called her and called her and finally came in to lean over the bed, saying, “Mama-bel. Please. Please, Mama.” Mabel could see the pain of it in her daughter’s eyes—another round—but she just couldn’t help it.
At the time, Daisy had just begun rehearsals to play Nora in A Doll’s House, so their darling Nick, whose talents made him the staple of the playhouse’s musical-theater productions, moved in to see Mabel through her bad time, as he had done so often before. No natural son could have loved her more than Nick did. She’d been so happy over the friendship that had burst into being when, barely out of high school, Daisy and Nick met in summer stock, but Mabel had never expected she would be the beneficiary of Nick’s seemingly endless store of devoted affection.
“C’mon, give me your hand,” Mabel now said to Daisy, but her daughter waved off the help, steadying herself with one hand on the back of the chair and the other braced on the counter.
“See there,” Mabel said, noting Daisy’s bright red cheeks, “you’ve gotten yourself overheated.”
“Well, it’s hot. What’s the thermostat set on?”
Mabel rolled her eyes, and when she caught Daisy doing the same, they both laughed. Not once in all the years they’d been together had they ever agreed on temperature: Daisy was always too hot, and Mabel was always too cold.
Mabel took a clean dish towel from the stack waiting to be packed, ran it under cold water and dabbed Daisy’s face with it. “The doctor said you have to be careful. It’s not usual to have a first baby so old.”
“I just saw him on Monday,” Daisy said, “and he told me he wished his eighteen-year-old mothers-to-be were all as healthy as I am.” She rinsed the towel under the faucet and wrung it out. “Do you hear me? Healthier than girls half my age.”
“Still,” Mabel said, dragging the chair back to its place at the table, “even healthy people can fall off chairs. If there’s any more climbing to do, let Barry do it.”
“What am I being elected for now?” Barry came in, arms full of empty boxes.
“You,” Daisy said, kissing him over the boxes and taking them from him, “are just in time to take another load to the car.” She pointed to one of the packed boxes and said, “I’ll be right behind you with another one.”
“Not too heavy,” Mabel said, but Daisy told her she worried too much, and then picked up a box marked Plates.
Mabel still missed having Daisy in the house. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to living alone—she hadn’t liked it before, those years in Indianapolis, and really for most of them, it felt like she wasn’t alone. Up until Paul died, she’d spent nearly all her time with him in the studio, going back to her rented room only to sleep. After Chicago, in their early years together, Mabel had savored Daisy’s company, expecting that someday her girl would move out on her own, get married, and then Daisy started high school—a beautiful copper-haired girl who attracted the notice of boys but wouldn’t let any of them near her. When she finished school, Daisy put all her energy into acting, working part-time and taking whatever roles she could get, until finally—the same year as Nick—she was asked to join the repertory theater as a resident player. Over the years, Daisy had rebuffed and ignored dozens of admirers, and so naturally Mabel had come to accept that her daughter, like she, wanted nothing to do with men and would always remain single. She could see herself going on and on with Daisy—and with Nick, who did like men but was terrified of being found out. A misfit bachelor trio, they were, content with one another. But then last summer, Nick met Ted, who wouldn’t let him hide, and only a few weeks later, Daisy unaccountably allowed a balding, thick-waisted insurance salesman to come into her dressing room to present her with an immense bouquet of pink roses. That was Barry. By the first of October, after a four-day engagement, they were married, onstage, not ten minutes after the curtain had come down on the final ovation for Daisy’s last performance in A Doll’s House.
What a happy night that had been. After everyone pitched in to clear the set—the cast, crew, a few dozen friends, and Ted, of course—they all danced, swirling in ever-changing and varied pairs against a backdrop of ornate nineteenth-century wallpaper. Mabel grew faint as the playhouse’s young lighting director twirled her across the floor, but Nick cut in and saved her, dancing her backstage to the brocade sofa, where she accepted the handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. “Now, this is just a breather, Belle,” he said, fanning her with a playbill. “Daisy will miss you if you’re gone too long.” From the wings, they watched Daisy laughing with her head back as she and Barry danced. Daisy could glide across a floor like vapor, but it pleased Mabel to see how her daughter matched herself to Barry’s gluey steps, as if being in his arms was the surest thing she’d ever known.
Such joyous upheavals—a new son-in-law, Daisy expecting, and Nick beginning to trust love at last—but at times Mabel still felt like her house had been picked up, shaken, and set back down again, nothing really broken this time but a few things fractured, everything out of order.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons, one of so many, why she wanted to fill as much of her time as she could with her soldiers. In this work, there was order and purpose—and it was important work, she believed, even if she couldn’t say just how. When Daisy had held her hands and said, “Why? Why do you want to do this?” Mabel could only think of something her mother had said long ago, about Jim Butcher’s time in France: “Terrible things he saw over there. Things nobody should ever see. Having to do things nobody should ever have to do.”
She showed Daisy some photographs she’d clipped from newspapers and magazines—some of villages turned to ash; some of weak, blindfolded prisoners, of skeletally thin Vietnamese lying dead; others of American soldiers wet, muddy, exhausted, bleeding—and she tried to explain the question sh
e was struggling to answer for herself: Were such terrible things—terrible things like killing, like having no choice but to kill—carved like ghostly scars into the face, perhaps only to be seen in those fleeting instants between the expressions one prepared for the world? In those instants only the camera could catch, Mabel wanted to find the truth about who those boys were before Vietnam—and after, the truth of who they had become.
Mabel sat down at the table and opened the magazine again. No devastated villages this time, but plenty of broken young men, overcome by shelling and rifle fire, doing their best to carry their wounded brethren to safety, patch them up, and keep them alive until help dropped from the sky.
Long ago, a month, maybe two, after Daisy had somehow gotten her home from Juniper, Mabel surfaced from a tranquilizer haze to remember Wallace’s grave and to gasp at the pain of her exploded heart. Nick was there, and he rose from the chair where he’d been reading to kneel by the bed and stroke her hair. She cried for a long time—it was spring and the sun was still up when she woke, but it was dark before she could hear anything her friend said to her.
“I’ll take you back, Belle—to Juniper—if you want to go.” And then Nick told her that he’d gone there himself, on his own. Daisy had told him everything she knew, and so, armed with names and dates, he’d borrowed a car and gone in search of Bertie.
What he found was a dead village. Though a few people still picked through the rubble, no one lived in Juniper anymore, and no one, Nick was told, ever planned to live there again. The young families had left first, dispersing to neighboring towns where the parents could get their children back into school. Soon, the older ones followed, and people who had lived for generations in Juniper put down new roots in Wilton, Paint Rock, and Tucker’s Creek. So Nick had gone to these places, too, asking everyone he could find if they remembered a couple of girls named Fischer or a boy called Wallace Hansford.
“There is something—” Nick said, and Mabel held her breath while he told her he’d spoken to an old friend of Wallace’s—Henry Layman. “He said Wallace asked him to give Bertie a letter, and so he went to look for her at the church. He said she seemed upset, and she wouldn’t wait for him when he called to her—just ran out the door. He saw her a few days later, at the funeral—he said your stepfather hanged himself. By then, he told me, it was all over town about how you and Wallace had run off together. He said he figured all that was in the letter was some kind of good-bye or explanation and that giving it to Bertie after all she’d been through would be like rubbing salt in a sore, so he threw it away. He never saw her again after that.”
Mabel shook violently and she clenched Nick’s hands until her knuckles were white.
“It’s possible,” Nick said, “really—I think it’s possible that there’s somebody around there who knows where she is, or at least where she was headed when she left. When you’re stronger, I can take you back there—me and Daisy—and we’ll keep looking, together.”
“No.” The small word croaked from Mabel’s throat. “No. No.” Tears burned like acid on her cheeks. “It wouldn’t be right.”
She told Nick about the letters she and Wallace had sent, about the letters she had sent for years after Wallace had gone, and about the one that had come back to her in Chicago—Deceased. “I think,” Mabel said, “I think—but I don’t know—that Bertie wrote that herself.” She knew then, finally knew it as a truth she still wanted to deny: After what she had done, she had no right to tread whatever new ground Bertie might have cleared for herself, no right to cause her to grieve Wallace anew, and no right to stand before her sister and torture her with a plea to forgive.
Mabel slid her hand across the open page of Life and looked at the broken men lying prostrate in a watery field of cane. Some damage could never be undone. One could only try to stand, take another’s arm, and stagger on.
“Mama! Mama, come quick!”
She leapt up at Daisy’s cry and ran toward the front room. “What is it? Honey! Are you hurt?”
Daisy was leaning on Barry, her arms wrapped around his neck, and she was dragging him around in a clumsy little dance. Barry looked over Daisy’s shoulder at Mabel, his face overspread with jubilation.
“Mama!” Daisy broke from the dance and held her hand out for Mabel. “Give me your hand! Give me your hand!” She pressed Mabel’s palm into her small round belly. “It moved. The baby moved! Press here. Harder. Can you feel it?”
Mabel pressed, trying to hold still while Daisy laughed and kissed her, while Barry laughed and kissed her, trying in spite of her own laughter to hold her palm firm and steady, waiting for the next tremor.
FOURTEEN
Prisoner
March 1973
Newman, Indiana
GRACE
IN THE ATTIC, ON A windy day, Grace always imagined the house might fall. The cold air sliced through the vents, sucking at the roof, and the windowpanes jiggled in their frames. Particular as he was about keeping up with repairs, Grandpa never seemed to notice that only specks of paint remained on the strips of wood dividing the glass. Even last spring when he had laid blankets of pink fiberglass between the rafters and pounded in planks for a floor to give them more room to stack boxes of cast-off toys and clothes, he’d left the windows alone. Grace was glad. Except for in summer, when it was too hot to breathe, the attic was her favorite place, and the windows, hazy with years of grime, made it seem abandoned, more hers for the claiming.
In spite of the grime and frost, the windows gave her a good view of the snow, pushed by the wind into powdery hills. Hour by hour since early morning, whenever Grandma said into the telephone how in all her born days she’d never seen a March snow like this, her estimate of how much had fallen had grown by an inch or two, despite the snowfall’s having ended before dawn. It was hard to tell how deep the snow would have been if it had lain flat and still, but from the attic, Grace could see what she could not see: the washtub Grandma kept turned over beside the grape arbor, just in case she had to get the clothes off the line in a hurry—gone; the maple tree, twenty-nine inches high when Grandpa planted it for her tenth birthday last May—buried; the green-painted swing set—the crosspiece of each A-frame seeming to sit on the snow, like a frozen snake.
She would like to put on her warmest clothes and go outside to play, maybe tunnel out a little cave where she could sit for a while all alone in the quiet, but Grandma would say, “You’ll catch your death and the ambulance won’t be able to get to us through this mess.” Grandma would tell Grace she might fall, that the snow might collapse on top of her. “And how would I ever get you out—saying I could even find you?”
When it was warned the snow might fall for days, Grandpa had packed up the car and driven to Crother’s Mill to stay with other men at Bill Junior’s. When he called to say he’d made it, he said the road was so slick it had taken him almost two hours to drive the eight miles. Mother’s boss, Patrick, had picked her up yesterday morning in his jeep, having arranged to give her a room at the Galloway Inn so the two of them could trade off in twelve-hour shifts at the reception desk. Grace had thought about calling Mother at the motel to ask if she could go outside, but she knew Mother would snap that she was busy, and Grandma would be mad that Grace had gone behind her. The first thing Lynn did when she heard about the snow was to get on the phone and talk her friend Elsie Myers into getting her parents to let Lynn stay with them while school was canceled. That had made Grandma mad, too, when she found out about it, but before anybody in the house knew the plan, Lynn had called Patrick to ask him to drop her off at Elsie’s on the way to the motel. When Patrick got there, he picked up Mother’s suitcase and said to Lynn, “All set, Lynn-dee-Lou?” Mother’s face turned red and her mouth went tight, and so did Grandma’s—but neither of them would speak out in front of company, which Lynn well knew.
Except for not being allowed to enjoy the snow, Grace didn’t mind being at home just with Grandma. She liked the peace of having the bedroom t
o herself, instead of having to share with Mother and Lynn, and if she asked nicely, like she had this afternoon, she could probably get Grandma’s permission to come up to the attic every day or two.
“I want to look for some old coloring books and crayons,” she’d said, “in case the TV goes out. Maybe some puzzles.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that?” Grandma pulled a saucepan from the cabinet beside the stove and set it on the counter.
“I’m tired of reading,” Grace said. “Lynn took all the good books with her.”
“All right, then.” Grandma spooned cocoa powder and sugar into the pan. “Reach me the milk, Grace,” she said. “Don’t stay too long and get yourself frozen. Look in the boxes alongside the chimney. And careful not to bang your head.”
She would get the coloring books and puzzles, but the real reason Grace had come to the attic was to find a safe place for her POW bracelet. For the last week, ever since she and Lynn had watched their POWs getting off the plane that had brought them from Hanoi, Lynn had been after her to send her bracelet back.
“I’m sending mine,” Lynn said, and a moment after the reporter identified the slim, straight figure coming down the roll-up stairs as Lt. Col. Conrad John Lewis, just promoted to colonel, Lynn had her bracelet off. “I’m getting an MIA next.”
A few minutes later, Capt. Mark P. Stevens, now Major Stevens, stepped off the plane, smiling and waving. The reporter said the major had gotten home just in time to celebrate his thirty-fourth birthday. Grace wished she could be there—wherever there would be for him—to hug him after he blew out the candles. She would have seen to it that his cake was simple and plain, no pastel scallops and icing roses.