The Waiting

by Cathy LaGrow

  Now that Minka was old enough to really imagine it, the idea of war seemed terrifying.

  “No,” Roy said, “this one’s turning bad. Dad says he’s seen this before. America’s gonna have to get on board, sooner or later, and when we do, all hell is gonna break loose. Sorry, honey.” He glanced at Minka.

  “They’ll send us somewhere first,” said Cecil. “Somewhere for training. Otherwise they’d have green young fellas shooting their own feet off.”

  “I know how to handle a gun, but I don’t wanna be a foot soldier,” Roy said, slapping his pants with one hand. “I’ve been thinking about it. If I have to go, I wanna be up in a plane. One of those fighter planes.”

  “Goodness,” said Minka. “A pilot? Roy, you don’t know how to fly a plane.” She was rubbing apples with a towel, making the rosy skins glow.

  “No, but they teach ya. They give you all the training and then ship you over.”

  “How do you get in?” Cecil asked. “Do you have to take tests? Do you need classes first?”

  “You just have to pass the physical, same as the regular army,” said Roy. He turned his head and blew smoke to the side, away from Minka. “The problem is my age. They don’t want anyone over twenty-eight. Not for pilots.”

  “Aren’t you thirty, like me?” asked Cecil.

  “Next birthday he will be,” said Minka. “September fifth,” she couldn’t resist adding proudly. Girlfriends knew such details.

  “Yeah, but I thought of a way around that.” Roy leaned forward intently. “A friend told me you just need a birth certificate to enlist. I can use my little brother’s.”

  “Which one?” asked Cecil.

  “Well, Robert’s, probably,” said Roy. “I’ve got eight years on him. I’d just have to use his name.”

  “What if you get caught?” Minka asked. She didn’t like bending rules.

  “Shoot, honey, when push comes to shove, they’re gonna be happy for every poor ole sap they can get.” He watched as Minka fanned out apples in a basket until they looked like a bouquet. He’d never seen anyone take such care with the way things looked, from the displays in her store to her slim, perfectly ironed skirts. A neat man himself, he appreciated that quality in others.

  “Roosevelt doesn’t seem like he wants to send our boys over there,” Cecil said.

  “Oh, it’ll happen eventually,” Roy said. “But I may not wait around to see. If Canada gets in first, I’ll go up there and join the Royal Canadian Air Force.”

  “If it comes to that, it’s gonna be hard on everyone,” said Cecil. “The women left at home, the families . . .”

  “It’ll be hard not to know what’s happening,” Minka agreed. “But we will all just have to square our shoulders and do what needs to be done. It’s the only thing you can do. And anyway,” she continued more shyly, “I can write letters.”

  Cecil looked at her. He looked at Roy.

  “Sure, honey. You can write to me,” Roy said.

  There was a pause as Roy took a drag. Then Cecil cleared his throat.

  “Have you, uh, heard from your wife lately?” he asked Roy.

  Roy looked at him.

  “Not lately, no.”

  “Your what?” Minka said. She was straightening tin cans of applesauce on a shelf. The words were so utterly ludicrous, they simply failed to register with her.

  There was another pause.

  “His, uh, wife,” Cecil said, his voice strained with casualness.

  For a moment, Minka thought, It’s a joke. She saw Roy staring at Cecil; he wasn’t smiling. Then a hot flash cut through her, and she had to grab the edge of the counter to keep her legs straight. Her mouth wouldn’t work.

  “We’re divorcing,” Roy said, his voice cool.

  “Wife?” Minka found her voice, but not a normal volume. “You’re married?”

  He looked at her. All of a sudden, she desperately wanted the warmth to return to his eyes.

  “Was,” Roy said. “It’s over.”

  “Wha . . . Where is she?” Minka asked.

  Roy stubbed out his cigarette, straightened his suit jacket.

  “She’s in the Black Hills,” he said. “She’s got tuberculosis. She’s divorcing me.”

  Minka couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  Roy stared at Cecil. Cecil held his gaze.

  “We got married right after high school,” Roy said as he looked back at Minka. “She’s been gone a long time. It wasn’t working. It’s over, honey.”

  Cecil stood up, untied his apron, laid it over the counter. He grabbed his hat.

  “I’m going for a walk, Minnie,” he said. “Roy.”

  Roy didn’t respond.

  Cecil shut the door. There was silence.

  “It’s been over, I promise,” Roy repeated. “I haven’t got the papers yet, but—”

  “When did you meet her?” Minka usually didn’t interrupt Roy, but her world was spinning.

  “In school. We got married too young, and then she got sick and had to go away, and it just . . .” He shrugged. “Faded away.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  “No, honey. I guess I did a long time ago, but . . . not now.”

  Minka held herself still.

  “I’ll get it taken care of before I go away,” Roy said.

  Then he changed the subject. Effortlessly, the way he guided her on the dance floor.

  * * *

  Minka didn’t know what to do. She wondered how many other people knew about this absent wife. What would her mother say? Minka’s life, save for one particular incident over which she’d had no control, had been one of rock-solid propriety. She never missed a Sunday service; she knew what the Scriptures said about divorce. What would the other women at church say? What did Roy’s parents and brothers think of her?

  She wanted to grab Roy’s arm and get answers. But her body went into automatic mode, serving a customer who came into the store.

  What should I do? Why has he treated me like his girlfriend? Does Roy care about me at all?

  She realized what a fool she’d been. Of course he wasn’t serious about her. How could someone like Roy be interested in someone like her? Yet, Roy’s attention continued, even intensified over the following days.

  And behind the panicked doubts and questions swirling in Minka’s mind, there was an unavoidable truth, which became more insistent in the days to come. She didn’t want to lose Roy. She’d already lost so much.

  Once the initial shock passed, Minka worked at the problem like a ball of dough, pounding it down, kneading it in her thoughts. How could he have kept the truth from her? But then, who was she to say anything about dark pasts, about secrets?

  Yet . . . married?

  As Roy returned day after day, his charms dismantled her. Newly emboldened, Minka told him about Betty Jane, and of course he couldn’t raise an eyebrow at the revelation. Not now. Roy was deliberately tender and kind about her loss. His reaction sealed the bond between them.

  Meanwhile, life rushed willingly to distract from personal complications. Rumors of war continued. Hitler had already defied the Treaty of Versailles and remilitarized the Rhineland, then annexed Austria and the Sudetenland. By March of 1939, Germans goose-stepped down the streets of Prague after an invasion of Czechoslovakia that nobody stopped. Britain and France simply looked away.

  “If Germany invades Poland, they have to fight,” Roy told Minka. The prospect of losing Roy in the skies over Europe kept her awake at night. Minka prayed fervently for her sweetheart’s safety, but praying for God’s guidance in her own life—and her decision about whether to marry Roy—never occurred to her. God was powerful, true, but Minka thought of Him as distant, removed, and formal. And she may not have prayed for His answer anyway: her heart wanted Roy for its own.

  Perhaps Minka looked away too. She never again brought up the subject of the weak-lunged young woman in the Black Hills.

  * * *

  As the grueling thirties dre
w to a close, war eclipsed all other subjects, personal or collective. The years at the grocery had been the most satisfying of Minka’s life, but it was clear that everyone’s daily routines would soon be drastically altered. Minka felt the winds of risk blowing and decided to upend her own life.

  John and Dorothy now lived in Rhode Island, where Dorothy worked the night shift at a cannery. She sent a letter—would Minka be willing to move there to help watch their daughter in the evenings?

  Roy, busy with his own military plans, told her to go.

  In July 1939 she packed her clothes in a valise, hugged Jennie and Jane tightly, and reveled in Roy’s departing endearments. Then she boarded a train bound for the East Coast. Her stomach churned with nervous exhilaration.

  Providence was a noisy city bursting with nearly fifteen times the population of Aberdeen. Almost immediately, Minka found a job at a Jewish dressmaker’s shop, measuring and cutting wool and silk fabrics, selling buttons and notions. Each morning, she rode a bus into the city, dodging trackless trolleys, sturdy black cars, and a startling number of pedestrians. Her evenings were sweetly filled with games and conversation with her eight-year-old niece. They went shopping together and sat among the flowers at beautiful Roger Williams Park.

  Minka missed Jane’s familiar presence, although Dorothy was a dear companion. Minka mostly longed for Roy—his male strength, his charm, their dynamic conversations, the grounding that came from being a couple.

  On September 1, two months after Minka left Aberdeen, Hitler’s Third Reich invaded Poland. After years of aggression, it was the last straw. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. Shortly thereafter, in the Canadian parliament’s first independent declaration of war, Canada joined the fight.

  Roy could not imagine continuing to peddle fruit while battles raged. He boarded a northbound train with Robert’s birth certificate folded carefully in his pocket. Six months after arriving in Montreal, he was accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force. The letters that flew between him and Minka only deepened their affection.

  The following spring, German forces invaded Holland, and personal news from the region ceased. Jennie would have to wait through five agonizing years, until the end of the war, to learn that her family had survived.

  When Roy finished his yearlong pilot training, Minka traveled to Montreal for a visit. Her suitcase was packed with her best clothes, most of them sewn herself with help from her aged Italian neighbor lady. The dreaded dairy overalls were a memory from the far-distant past.

  This was Minka’s first trip outside the United States, and she dressed beautifully for it, in tailored suits with slim jackets, with belts or ribbons tied around her waist. She fastened brooches to her chest, pins on her collars. Her hair was neatly curled and pinned behind her ears. Her Italian friend had made her a pretty, feminine soldier’s cap, and Minka wore it proudly for her pilot beau, tilted to the right just like his. She tried to keep her hands covered up with soft gloves, although Roy never teased her about her big, twisted fingers. To the day he died, he never would.

  Roy and Minka walked through green Montreal parks under a warm summer sun. They were no longer starry-eyed children—Minka would be thirty in a few months—but the war had covered everything with an exhilarating tension. Roy was headed to England, to fly bombers alongside members of the Royal Air Force. There was no way of knowing whether he would ever come back. Perhaps they would have only this day, this moment.

  It felt almost like the end of time.

  Using a camera borrowed from Dorothy, Minka snapped photo after photo of Roy in uniform. And though she usually preferred to stay behind the camera, she posed for several snapshots. Roy said he wanted something to remember her by. Like millions of women around the world, Minka promised to wait faithfully for her man.

  And then, after receiving a final vaccination against smallpox, Roy was gone. Minka returned to Rhode Island. Four months later, on December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan bombed a naval base at Pearl Harbor. America was at war. Men who’d fought and bled in the First World War now sent their sons to fight in the second.

  Newspapers were filled with updates on troop movements, and American citizens who could not fight were eager to help in any way they could. In Rhode Island, mills and plants churned out bayonets and uniforms and parachute cases, and a shipyard was rapidly built to supply cargo vessels under the new Emergency Shipbuilding Program. A navy base packed freshly minted sailors onto newly christened vessels before sending them across the water to fight for all of their survival. Theaters broadcast the news of the war in film reels before featured movies, giving anxious citizens an additional reason to take in a show.

  Minka’s own life, against such a dramatic background, remained largely quiet. She kept selling buttons and fabric, tending to her niece, Betty, and sending letters. Minka wrote to Miss Bragstad at Thanksgiving and Christmas, including a dollar in each letter to be used “towards your turkey.” And she sent a letter each May, with presents for the babies at the home, to commemorate Betty Jane’s birthday.

  She also wrote to Roy in England. Occasionally she received a note or picture from him. He mailed her black-and-white photos of himself, each marked with the same signature across the bottom: Always, Roy. He wasn’t allowed to give details of his sorties, so his letters were short.

  Long after the war was over, Minka would find Roy’s little black book, filled in with the names of British girls he’d courted during those desperate days in England. But such possibilities never crossed her mind while she sat at home, waiting.

  Roy transferred to the US Army Air Forces early in 1943, still using the false name of Robert Disbrow. He flew back and forth across the Atlantic, delivering bombers to the war effort, until stress began to lash his stomach with painful ulcers. In May 1944, Minka got a surprise phone call from New York—it was Roy, who’d just been shipped back under medical leave. Military doctors did surgery but couldn’t fully repair the damage to his digestive system. During a brief army hearing, Roy asked for permission to keep flying planes, but in the end, he was honorably discharged.

  He came home, for good. He came back to Minka.

  But he didn’t come back the same.

  Chapter Ten

  1944–1947

  IN OCTOBER OF 1944, just before Minka’s thirty-third birthday, she and Roy married quietly in an empty church in Providence. It was a wartime wedding, modest and simple. The bride wore an everyday dress she’d sewn herself. The couple skipped a honeymoon, and Roy went immediately back to his job working the night shift at the shipyards, a position he’d obtained that spring, after his discharge from the Army Air Forces. For a while Minka juggled overlapping schedules, cooking midnight dinners for her new husband, then rising a few hours later for her shift at the fabric store.

  When she wrote to Miss Bragstad that Christmas, for the first time she signed her letter as a grown-up: “Minka” instead of “Minnie.”

  I’m wondering how my little Betty is. I know I should be very proud of her now. She must be a young lady, nearly sixteen. I think of her so often, and hope so much she’ll always be a credit & joy to her parents. You will write me in your letter, a bit about her won’t you?

  . . . I’m enclosing a bit towards your Xmas dinner at the home. I sincerely hope it will be a merry one for all. The home must be a blessing for many a girl today—I only wish I could find a little boy & girl under my Xmas tree. You haven’t a pr of twins, have you?

  When Germany surrendered the following May, in 1945, America was nearly overcome with giddy relief as sons and brothers and husbands came home. Eager to take advantage of the new GI Bill, Roy decided to move to Minneapolis, where he could take drafting classes at the Dunwoody Institute. The renowned Mayo Clinic was nearby, too, in case he needed treatment for his recurring stomach problems.

  For the rest of her life, Minka would consider Minneapolis, with its acres of glittering lakes and clusters of bushy green trees, the most beautiful city
she had ever seen. The mighty Mississippi River flowed right through it, like something from a fairy-tale kingdom. The downtown district was crowded with grand cathedrals and skyscrapers, cultural institutes, and fancy hotels. Block after block, a glorious, giddy mess of honking cars filled the streets, and a person could go dizzy looking at all the signs and advertisements lining the sidewalks. Half a million people called this city home—and when they went out in public, everyone seemed to dress to the nines.

  Minka had spent time here before, briefly, a few years after Betty Jane’s birth. A businessman from Aberdeen had a home here, and when jobs dried up in South Dakota during the Depression, she’d come here to be his housekeeper. She’d been lonely and heartbroken then, but her life was different now.

  Now her name was on the deed to a tall, narrow house on a tree-lined street just two blocks from the beaches of Lake Calhoun, a popular spot for boaters and sunbathers. Jennie had given her the money for a down payment—recompense for all the years of milking cows and twisting sausages and working in the store. Although the house was already a half-century old and in need of fresh paint and a good cleaning, it was roomy enough to take in renters, and Minka envisioned it becoming a beautiful home under her loving care.

  Most satisfying, the last name printed on that deed was Disbrow.

  Two months after they arrived in the City of Lakes, the girl who’d once marveled at the novelty of an icebox watched as something called an atomic bomb put a horrifying coda on the Second World War.

  In the booming economy they both found work, Roy on a production line and Minka at another yard goods store. Each morning, the couple had coffee and oatmeal together in their new kitchen, then set out into a city that seemed to sweep residents along the sidewalks with postwar energy. In the evenings, Minka cooked dinners that were easy on Roy’s sensitive stomach, often a simple pot of navy beans, his favorite. Then the couple changed into old clothes and worked on the bottom half of their house, readying it for renters.

  They painted walls and fixed plumbing and hung cheerful green-and-white-striped awnings outside. Roy installed window boxes and built decorative shelves around the bulky radiators. Minka cleaned house and spent hours in the basement with a washboard and wringer, doing laundry by hand as she always had. She sewed dresses for herself and wool coats for them both.