Still unwilling to attend movies, Sheldon spent most of his time alone, reading, pining for new affections, burning for a love to replace what was lost, hungry for passions he could only imagine. This loneliness was a new weight.
Sometimes, when he reached a point in a story that seemed unrealistic or contrived, he would pull the green duffel bag out from under his bed and look at the stacks of money he’d stolen from Thaleman. It occurred to him that if he hadn’t been such a hothead, he could have walked out with the stolen jewels too. Then again, if he’d lied to Mirabelle about throwing the jewels in the river and kept them instead, all of this would have felt different. Worse, somehow.
There can be a cost to contentment, and he was starting to see the range of ways that fate can demand payment.
With no real plans beyond graduation—a year early at this rate—he haunted the house more like a ghost than a boy.
On December 8 of 1941, everything changed.
Pearl
NATE WAS SITTING ON the sofa by the bookshelf and staring into the fire with a glass of whiskey as the condensation on the outside of the glass slid down toward the polished wood of the end table. He often sat with a drink without touching it. Sheldon realized, in time, that the presence of Nate’s drink gave the formlessness of sitting there a name.
It was a Monday. Mirabelle had left the radio on before she left for work as she usually did. Sheldon had decided to stay home on account of a cold. He was so far ahead in his classes that he hardly thought it mattered, and no one much cared what he did anymore. At 12:30 in the afternoon, Roosevelt was addressing a joint session of Congress. Sheldon wasn’t listening and was instead reading Evil Under the Sun, a new book by Agatha Christie. Since almost killing that drunk who ran Lenny off the road near Grossinger’s, Sheldon’s taste for crime novels had changed. They never matched the emotional intensity of the reality, and their distance from lived experience made him edgy. He preferred mysteries now to violence or revenge. Painless puzzles were interesting.
Sheldon looked up from Hercule Poirot when he heard the slow, anguished voice of the president coming on.
Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our secretary of state a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
Sheldon didn’t hear the rest of the speech because Uncle Nate spoke.
At first, Sheldon couldn’t place the sound. When he looked at Nate, he saw that his uncle was looking at him.
“Uncle Nate?”
Nate was not an invalid. He cleaned himself and dressed. He shaved and wore a tie even though he hadn’t gone to work since Abe’s death. To Sheldon, he was a ghost, a soul that drifted through the world without touching it or being touched by it. His son’s death was all-encompassing to him. There was no need for, or room for, anything else.
Sheldon understood—well enough, anyway. He remembered his own solitary walk from the car wreck that killed his father. That too had been a wordless time. Now, however, Nate was breaking his silence and speaking.
But it was only one word
“Springfield.”
“Springfield? The city? In Massachusetts?” Sheldon asked.
“Your father said that if there was ever another war and he wasn’t alive to see it, you were to go to Springfield. You have to go to Springfield. In Massachusetts. There’s a bus.”
“Me?”
“The recruitment office in Springfield. You need to enlist in Springfield. He was very clear about this in case America ever went to war again.”
“Why?”
There were new messages from his father? His father had preferences and plans for him even now?
“What else?” Sheldon said. “Uncle Nate. What else? What else does my father want?”
There was nothing else.
“Springfield?” Sheldon asked again.
His father hated war, but he had said that it anchored the family deeper into America. He never said that he regretted going. He only said that it was awful. Would he have wanted Sheldon to fight?
Take it, Sheldon. Take it all.
“Uncle Nate,” Sheldon pleaded. “Why did my father tell me to go to Springfield? Did he want me to sign up? To fight?”
“He said that if there’s a war you should enlist in Springfield. That’s all I know.”
* * *
The story of the Japanese attack appeared in the papers accompanied by terrible images. The destruction was beyond Sheldon’s comprehension. The entire Pacific fleet had been sunk or close enough. He had heard a reporter from KGU in Honolulu call NBC in New York during the bombing. The reporter there had witnessed the destruction from a nearby building. It had been going on for three hours by then. The reporter’s voice made Sheldon see the fires on the ships and smell them burning.
* * *
At school, the implications were discussed all week. Congress declared war on Japan immediately, and everyone was gearing up for some kind of engagement. Some of the older boys enlisted while others wondered when the draft would start.
* * *
“You signing up, Sheldon?” asked a boy named Tommy, whose father played xylophone in a big band that toured the state. Tommy was excited; he wanted to fight.
“I don’t know. It’s the Germans I’m after.”
Tommy shrugged. He didn’t care about any of that. He wanted to march and wear uniforms and feel grown up. Sheldon didn’t want to do any of those things.
Germany declared war on the United States four days later on the eleventh. That was when Sheldon stopped wondering what to do and bought a bus ticket for Springfield.
* * *
He had had other plans. Simpler plans for the future.
“I think I’m going to build a little cottage,” Sheldon had said to Lenny at the end of the summer on the beach at Grossinger’s Lake at dawn. The sky had been a pastel pink and the water was as smooth as glass. Lenny found a skimming stone but chose not to use it. He rolled it around in his hand as they avoided the topic of Abe’s death and tried to think of the future.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Put up a little house where the other one used to be. I guess when I’m eighteen the land’s mine, you know? I figure I can probably have a small house put up for about two thousand dollars.”
“You want to go back after school? ’Cuz I think we should go to New York.”
“I think I want it to be there whether I’m there or not.” Sheldon had plucked three tall blades of grass that were growing in the sand. He braided them together as he used to do with Mirabelle’s hair when they listened to the radio—before they both grew up. “But, yeah, I think maybe I’ll come with you.”
“To New York?”
“Yeah.”
“And do what?”
“Work. You know. Like the way people do.”
“You want to be my manager?”
“No. I really don’t.”
“Not much to manage yet anyway. Think we can come back to the Catskills next summer?”
“We might have to pick another hotel.”
* * *
Sheldon was born in Springfield in 1926, some thirty miles due south of Whately. Joseph and Lila hadn’t been living there, and they didn’t have any friends who did, but the hospital had been the best in the area, and so it was where Sheldon had first drawn breath. As he rode the bus north from Hartford, he couldn’t think of an
y other reason his father would want him to go to Springfield.
The bus arrived in the snow and hissed to a stop. The door opened and the cold came in before the first person went out, a breath of life. Sheldon’s boots splashed into a black puddle and above him the sky was slate gray. A few snowflakes fell or were blown from the rooftops of the buildings. With a rucksack on his shoulders and Abe’s old wool coat for warmth, Sheldon trekked two miles to the recruiting station.
It was December 15, 1941, a Monday morning. He was skipping school for this, but he needed to know how it all worked so he could plan it out. He’d be done with high school in June of 1943 and that’s when he wanted to lie about his age and join up.
* * *
The flag outside the recruitment center was flying at half-mast. A bell rang as Sheldon stepped inside, as though he were entering a greengrocer’s. He had expected a queue of a thousand men standing outside, like in those photos of the Depression—or like the queue that had formed during the hurricane when they had built the levees to hold back the Connecticut River. That wasn’t the case, though.
A man in a sharp blue uniform who was sitting behind a desk said, “Good morning. How can I help you?”
The man was middle-aged. He wore glasses, and Sheldon saw a medical insignia on his lapel.
“I want to sign up after I finish high school next summer,” said Sheldon, unsure whether to stamp the remaining snow from his shoes. “So, I just . . . I don’t know . . . I want to know how it all works.”
The man looked Sheldon over. He nodded a few times. “Good for you.”
Sheldon said nothing.
“Want to fight the Japs?”
“No. The other ones.”
The man frowned. “You’re not here because of Pearl Harbor? Everyone wants to join the navy now.”
“I want to be a marine. And I want to go to Germany. I want to go to Berlin.”
The man was impassive. He was still looking at Sheldon and nothing obvious on his face had changed, but Sheldon felt as though he was now looking at him in a new way.
“Why?”
“My father was in the army in World War I,” Sheldon said. “The Yankee Division, 26th Infantry. He was in Apremont in France near Saint-Mihiel. I used to hunt with my dad. And track. I know my way around the woods. Marines get there first, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well. That’s it, then. No point in waiting around.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sheldon Horowitz.”
“Where you from?”
“Whately.”
“I’m going to check some records, and then we can do a physical.”
“I want to finish high school. My parents wanted me educated.”
“You’re only shy a year and a semester, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We can make a diploma happen. Stay there, I’ll be right back.”
Sheldon removed his rucksack and sat on a plastic chair. An American flag was curled around a pole in the corner of the room across from a rack with the officer’s wool coat on it. A photograph of President Roosevelt was framed in mahogany beside a picture of a man in a military uniform Sheldon didn’t recognize, a general of some kind.
On the table in front of him was today’s Boston Daily Globe and a copy of Stars and Stripes. Picking up the military newspaper would have been embarrassing somehow, as though it would prove to the officer (if he ever came back into the room) that Sheldon was a romantic with big dreams of heroism. He thought it would make him look immature and he already felt short and insufficiently muscular.
RETREAT FROM MOSCOW
MOSCOW, Monday, Dec. 15 (AP)—Rampant Red armies declared today they had the Germans on the run in a retreat approaching the scale of Napoleon’s cold and dismal retirement from Moscow and had overtaken the backtracking Hitler legions with a headlong campaign of extermination.
To the right was local news.
FIREWOMEN OF BAY STATE LEAD NATION
NEEDHAM, Dec. 14—American’s first women’s fire-fighting auxiliary class was graduated here today when 60 volunteers of the Massachusetts Women’s Defense Corps staged a demonstration and received diplomas at Central Fire Station.
Jumping into nets from second-story windows, carrying hose lines up fire ladders and smothering “bomb” fires, the women demonstrated what they had learned in the six weeks’ course in all forms of fire-fighting.
The officer returned from the back room holding a manila folder. He sat at his desk and spoke to Sheldon.
“Sheldon Horowitz. Whately. Born September 7, 1926, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Your father is Joseph and your mother is Lila. That’s you?”
Sheldon didn’t like that his birthday was mentioned. The officer looked capable of both addition and subtraction, and he’d put together his age soon enough.
“I said is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Where are your parents? They know you’re here?”
“They’re dead. And yes.”
The man didn’t understand but continued. “It’s laudable that you want to join. But we don’t need you yet.”
“Maybe you do.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe we do. But that’s not your call. You’ve got the paper there, right? Front page, below the fold on the left. You see it?”
Sheldon did see it. The first paragraph said it all.
MEN OUTSIDE 21–35 AGE MAY NOT BE DRAFTED
Washington, Dec. 14 (AP)—War Department officials made clear today that it would be a long time—perhaps never—before any men outside the 21–35 age group are drafted for the Army despite the proposal to require all aged 18 to 64, inclusive, to register.
“You turned fifteen a few months ago. You’re three years shy of having to register, and the War Department’s not even interested in you for another three years after you turn eighteen.” The man then mumbled something that sounded to Sheldon like “notwithstanding the medical issues,” but he was certain that he didn’t hear it correctly because he had no medical issues. “Until you’re eighteen in September of 1944, this is isn’t even a discussion, and I hope the war will be over by then. Meanwhile . . . go be a kid. We’re fighting for you. You don’t need to fight for us. You can pick up the baton later. That’s how it all works.”
The man closed the file. Before Sheldon could stop himself, he looked the man dead in the eye and said in a quiet voice, “I’m no coward.”
The officer’s face drooped.
“I’m going home tonight to see my wife, and when I do, I’m going to tell her that a fifteen-year-old orphan came to my office today wanting to sign up and fight the Nazis as a marine so he could be the first boots on the ground during the liberation of Europe. No, Sheldon Horowitz, you are no coward. And I’m sure your father knew that from the moment you took your first steps. What I’m telling you is that your job, right now, is to go live. My personal advice? Go make something. Build something. Fix something. The whole world’s breaking. We need all the help we can putting things together.”
He then told Sheldon to have a good trip home and that he heard the weather was supposed to break later. It’ll be a cold but pretty one.
* * *
Sheldon wandered out of the austere building into a future that continued to change and change and change again no matter how often he thought he knew what he was supposed to do and no matter how often he set about trying to pick a direction and go there. He thought of when the hurricane uprooted trees and the river overflowed its banks, and it was obvious then that everything he’d thought was permanent could be overturned and washed away, but it hadn’t crossed his mind until now that perhaps all of this might never settle down. The whole thing. All of life, always. Maybe this wasn’t a “phase” as his mother used to call it. Maybe this was how it worked.
He told Lenny he wanted to put up a cabin. And he would. But standing there in the melting snow on a December day, all he could think of was his father’s clock a
nd how he really did need to get that fixed and—once he did—how he’d need a wall to hang it on.
French
AFTER RETURNING TO ICELAND following Abe’s funeral, Louis had thought he was going to be out of the military by Christmas, but then Pearl Harbor happened, and shortly after that, Germany declared war on the United States. Unwilling to let Louis’s expertise go to waste, the RCAF sent him to an airbase in Britain until the spring of 1943. During their time apart, he and Mirabelle wrote letters to each other faithfully.
Mirabelle didn’t fall into another failed romance, nor did she make the mistake of looking on this new chance too lightly. It was because of Abe, and she knew that. It was because of Abe that she had met Louis, of course, but it was also because of Abe’s death that her wanderlust and rebelliousness had been tempered. Her misadventure at Grossinger’s may also have played a part.
When she buried her brother, she also buried her need to be an adult, because she became one on that day.
As they corresponded—and unbeknownst to Mirabelle—Louis was flying antisubmarine patrols over the Bay of Biscay near Lorient between Brest and Nantes. Louis and his crew were pulled out of The Shrew and placed back into a Vickers Wellington, this one fitted with a new Leigh Light that could spot U-boats at night. On one challenging run, they met flak from a land-based antiaircraft gun, and one bullet struck the cockpit window, shattering off a piece of glass that severed a nerve in Louis’s right arm. He brought the plane home to England safely, but on recovery, he had a twitch in his hand that wouldn’t go away. By the autumn, it was clear that his recovery would never be complete, and—while no longer in pain and otherwise well—he no longer had the reflexes or dexterity to be a pilot. He was discharged. The war, for him, was over.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 31