The Major's Daughter

by J. P. Francis

  They assembled shortly after breakfast and Major Brennan addressed them.

  William had been caught in Portland, Maine, the major said through his daughter, Collie. William had surrendered peacefully and was now being sent to Fort Devens, where the security would be greater. He said he understood it was their duty to try to escape, but given the rural quality of the camp, and the unlikelihood of their being able to return to Germany under current circumstances, he hoped they would reconsider their responsibility to their fellow prisoners.

  Then he ordered them to work. It concluded that simply. August mustered with his work crew, now short one man for William’s disappearance. As he passed through the front gate, he turned to the window where Collie worked. He saw her bent over a paper and he smiled at the sight of her. He willed her to look up, to catch his eyes, but she seemed intent on whatever she was doing, and he passed out to the twitch horses, a day in the woods before him.

  • • •

  The poem lived in her pocket as if it were a pet mouse. She was embarrassed to admit how carefully she had worked to translate the lines, each one desperate with meaning. She had already copied out her translation to Estelle, sending it with the morning post. In the letter to her friend she asked her opinion of the lines as if she meant the question merely as an academic exercise. She asked her, too, to bring a book of German verse. To bring anything, really, that might increase her understanding of the language. She passed it off as something required for camp life, but in reality she wanted the German verses to share with August.

  That thought made her stomach flip and her blood push closer to her skin. How ridiculous she was! At certain moments she could take a step back and see herself clearly. She saw this absurd young woman poring over the scant German lines, ascribing meaning to each syllable, giving them the attention reserved for biblical passages. What had he said? It was merely a poem he remembered from his school days, so she should, she felt, attribute no special qualities to the poem, but she could not resist. The poem mixed with her memory of him standing before her desk, his broad shoulders nearly blocking out the light from outdoors, the sweet flow of his locks over his forehead and shoulders. She was worse than Marie in her romantic turn of mind.

  At lunch, however, she carried a sandwich to the pole barn where the horses were kept. They were all out cutting now, so she sat in the sunlight on a cobbled bench someone had slapped together beside the horse stable. The air smelled of early summer, or late spring, and the scent of manure mixed in was not unpleasant. In the right breeze she sometimes caught the moist fragrance of the river, too, its water pressing southward toward the Pemigewasset and Merrimack. She ate slowly, taking pleasure in the silence. Noon felt sleepy and still, and it had come to be her favorite time of day. Red, the German cook, had prepared a sort of meat-loaf sandwich that was quite good. She ate it slowly and let the sun warm her, and tried, unsuccessfully, to resist pulling the poem out to read.

  She wrapped up the second half of the sandwich in waxed paper, cleaned her hands on a small handkerchief, then edged the poem out of her pocket. Her copy lay within his. She read his German version first, then slowly read the English translation aloud.

  Now everything, everything must change.

  The world becomes more beautiful with each day;

  one doesn’t know what may yet happen.

  She loved its simplicity. She had wrestled with the word change in the first line, debating if it had meant turn instead. The difference was subtle but substantial. Turn changed the meaning into something more agricultural, she felt, while change spoke to the human condition. She preferred turn for its poeticism, but change, she concluded, was more accurate. It was something she would like to ask August himself if given the chance.

  Naturally the poem meant more than that to her. What had he intended by giving it to her? That was the question her mind could not resolve. At the least he had meant it as an overture of friendship, not merely as an exercise in translation. It felt impossible to know what a man thought; add to that his German ancestry, and the task seemed insurmountable. She wondered, for instance, if he saw her as a woman apart from her role as daughter to her father, the camp commandant. Or was he, perhaps, of genuinely scholarly disposition, so that he saw the exchange of poetry as simple cross-cultural exchange? She wished Estelle would hurry, because she would like to put the question to her.

  In the afternoon, while her father and Lieutenant Peters were out checking on two of the cutting teams, she transcribed a clean copy for Private August Wahrlich. She made a mistake the first time, blotting ink on the second line, and had to start over. It took her a half hour to make the copy to her satisfaction, then she stalled as she realized she might write a brief note of explanation to him concerning the translation. Her first attempt sounded too formal and condescending, as if she were doing him a great favor by tendering the translation. She scrapped it and began again, this time speaking directly from her heart. She kept it brief. She said—truthfully, she felt—that she had found the poem lovely and challenging at once. She raised the question of the word change versus turn, then concluded by saying she hoped soon to have a book of German verse that she might share with him. The last part, about the book and hoping to share it with him, made her nervous. Before she put the letter and translation into an envelope, she nearly crumpled the entire enterprise up and threw it in the waste can. But that wasn’t honest; she yearned to pass along the note to him, and she finally sealed the envelope as quickly as she could and put it in the center drawer of her desk. It remained there beating—like Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” she thought—until the men began streaming back from the woods.

  Luck worked in her favor. She heard a lot of yelling and laughing, and when she glanced out she saw the men—Germans and Americans together—ringed around something at their feet. Lieutenant Peters stuck his head into the administrative building and told her the cause of the excitement.

  “They have a bear cub!” he said, obviously pleased with the discovery. “Come take a look.”

  “Where—”

  “It was in a tree when they cut it down. No one saw it beforehand, and the mother bear must have been scared away. They’ve named it Bruno. Come and see.”

  On impulse she grabbed the letter and tucked it into her waistband. Then she followed Lieutenant Peters outside. The men formed a fence to keep the bear in the middle of their circle. She had a brief impression of something small and black scuttling around at their feet. The men pulled back when they noticed her, many of them holding out their hands as if, presto, they unveiled a great treasure. One man, a German, rested on his knees before the tiny bear and provided a base when the bear needed reassuring. Collie felt her heart melt at the sight of the little orphan. Clearly it missed its mother, but it still toddled around, trying to make sense of what had occurred. The men treated it sweetly. The man on the ground, especially, seemed to feel some proprietorship over it. He guided it when it seemed shaky and twice lifted it up and held it like a baby. Whenever he let it run as it liked, it bawled for its mother and traced the interior of the circle.

  August arrived with his cutting crew before long. Collie saw him, but he was quickly lost in the swarm of men who came to look. The bear served as a magnet; no one could ignore it. August, however, pushed his way to the front of the ranks. When the man in the center saw August he spoke to him rapidly in German. August smiled and translated, his eyes directly on Collie’s.

  “He asks if you want to hold it,” he said, nodding toward the man in the center and the little bear.

  “Yes, I would.”

  That seemed to please all the men in the circle. The man in the center lifted the bear carefully and handed it to Collie. Whatever discomfort she felt at being the only woman in a circle of men, disappeared the moment she held little Bruno. He was a darling! His fur felt fine and dense, and his black, inquisitive eyes did not leave hers. He wei
ghed little, but what there was of him seemed vital and eager. He had four paws of good claws, and his pointed snout angled out in a brown muzzle. Around her she heard men exclaim in German. She wondered if they understood that she comprehended most of what they said. As if reading her mind, one man—the man who seemed the bear’s owner—spoke to her directly in German.

  “Do you like him? His name is Bruno.”

  “I like him very much,” she answered in German. “I’m sorry he’s an orphan.”

  “We’ll take good care of him,” the man said. “He can be our mascot.”

  “He’ll get big rather quickly,” said someone from the group of men.

  “In Germany he would be used for the circus,” said the man on his knees.

  “Maybe you can teach him to ride a bicycle.”

  She did not intend it to be particularly funny, but the men gave a good, hearty laugh at the joke. She felt the laughter must stem from the idea of interacting with the commandant’s daughter. At the same time it felt good to laugh with the men. She wondered what the editorial writers would say if they could see that Germans and Americans had so much in common after all. She passed little Bruno to Lieutenant Peters, though the bear struggled to stay with her.

  “Were you able to translate the poem I gave you?” August asked in German.

  He had crossed the circle and suddenly stood beside her. He smelled of pine and the heat of the day. She quickly drew the letter from her waistband and passed it to him.

  “A few of the lines gave me difficulty,” she said, “and I had difficulty with the meter. But I think I’ve managed.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “It was my pleasure. It’s a lovely poem. I’d never heard of the poet before.”

  How strange and powerful it felt to be near him! She worried he would snap open the letter and read it in front of her. But fortunately the bear managed to struggle free from Lieutenant Peters at that moment and Lieutenant Peters hurriedly released him on the ground. The little bear ran to the man at the center of the ring for security, and the men laughed at seeing such a human behavior.

  Gradually the men, tired and dirty from work, began to disband. The man in the center picked up the bear and carried it like a baby toward the barracks. He made Bruno wave good-bye with his tiny paw. Collie waved back, then looked up once more at August. He smiled, and their eyes could not let go.

  “Do you write your own poetry?” Collie asked, more for conversation than for anything else.

  “Yes, a little.”

  “I look forward to reading your work someday.”

  “It’s nothing important, honestly.”

  “I’m sure you underestimate yourself,” Collie said.

  “I am better at music. I have a few years of classical training.”

  “How wonderful. On the piano?”

  “Yes. I am not so good, but I can manage. Do you play?”

  “Only in the most rudimentary fashion. I’ve requisitioned a piano, because I thought it would be good for camp morale. But as for me, ‘Chopsticks,’” she said the last word in English, because she had no idea what the word in German might be.

  He made a puzzled face. She pantomimed two hands playing “Chopsticks” and he nodded immediately.

  “Yes, of course. ‘Chopsticks.’”

  His mispronunciation of chopsticks endeared him to her. At the same moment, she realized the other men had disappeared, even Lieutenant Peters. Part of her wanted to say that speaking to a young man was perfectly respectable, but another part of her understood how obvious their attraction must appear. She felt nervous at the thought of it.

  “A nice bear,” he said, apparently finding it as difficult as she did to break away.

  “Yes, a lovely little thing.”

  “Can you tell me,” he asked, his face suddenly serious, “if the rumors are true that we will be sent to England after this? Still as prisoners?”

  “I haven’t heard such a thing.”

  “It’s talked about in the barracks. We will work to make reparations to England for our bombing of London.”

  “I think it’s too early to know what may happen.”

  “That would be very hard,” he said, pushing his chin toward the barracks. “Hard on these men.”

  “Yes, I could imagine.”

  “Rumors are like mice. They live in the corners and feed on crumbs.”

  He smiled. It was a charming smile. For a moment she could do nothing but stay in his eyes. Finally she managed to excuse herself without panic. He thanked her again for the poem and promised to read it that night. She backed away and said good-bye. She wondered, as she climbed the steps to the administration building, if he felt even the smallest part of what she could not help but feel.

  • • •

  “If you ask me, the Germans should pay heavily, heavily indeed for their aggression,” Sherman Heights said, his hand pushing away a large cigar from his mouth. “We can’t let them up again. We should put our heel on their throats and not give them a breath. We went too easy on them after the First War.”

  “They think they have the right . . . ,” another man began, but Major Brennan watched him get cut off by a reporter, a thin, serpentine man who wrote for one of the Boston papers.

  “You said yourself, Major, that there has already been an escape. It’s a bad precedent to have German prisoners on our soil. This war should be fought on European soil, not here,” the reporter, a man named Whipple, or Whittle, Major Brennan couldn’t remember, said from his position near the fireplace of the Heights’ magnificent home. The reporter held a drink in his hand that threatened to slosh over the rim.

  “We didn’t have a choice in it,” said Elman Thorne, one of the town fathers from Stark. He was a large, stolid man, with a farmer’s neck and heavy shoulders. “Washington gave the orders and we followed. They play the music and we dance. . . .”

  “Did the escaped German . . . did he make it very far? Are the reports accurate that he got stopped on his way to Boston?” the reporter asked.

  Major Brennan could not accommodate them all. Everywhere he went these questions bombarded him, and he knew without doubt that no answer he gave would satisfy them. They spoke to hear their own thoughts; they spoke to top one another, to prove their insight into the war was greater than the next man’s. It fatigued him. He had known as soon as Sherman Heights had invited him into his study, abandoning his daughter to the care of Heights’s wife, Eleanor, that he had stepped into the lion’s den. The men, huddling to smoke and drink in Sherman Heights’s luxurious study, had fallen on him as soon as he had stepped through the door. Major Brennan understood he represented the faceless authorities, the government, the military, for men who felt removed from the war. Their questions betrayed a hunger for involvement, for understanding, that he was powerless to provide.

  “The escaped German did not get far,” Major Brennan said wearily. “Whatever you’ve heard to the contrary is mere rumor. He was not a—”

  “The fact that he got out at all,” Thorne, the town father, interrupted, “is a travesty. I’m all for a humane treatment of prisoners, I am, but in this case . . .”

  “What I was going to say is that the prisoner was not what you would call an aggressive sort. He was a pretty timid boy, by all accounts. I think he was less on the warpath and more a simple case of homesickness.”

  “That may be,” Whipple, or Whittle said, his drink going down too fast, Major Brennan saw, “but what about that next lad? Or the one after that? They’re threats to the community and to the country at large.”

  Happily Eleanor Heights tapped on the door, then breezed in to tell her husband that he had run off with half of the party. She was a tall, handsome woman with a nose too large for her face. Yet the nose worked; it gave her a Roman dignity, a face not typical in Maine. Major Brennan watc
hed Sherman Heights push out of his wingback chair, his cigar emitting a cloud above his head. He laughed and shrugged, giving in to his wife immediately.

  “Cake is being served,” Eleanor Heights announced. “You’ll miss out if you don’t come directly. And as it’s a cake for me, I’m going to insist you men break this up immediately and come along.”

  Major Brennan followed his hosts out to the party proper. The last daylight washed the large living room in quiet grays. A maid had apparently delivered a three-tiered cake to the large dining room table, and she now busily lighted the candles that bristled from the top. The room lights had been lowered to add to the atmosphere.

  “I’m fifty years old today,” Eleanor Heights announced to the group around the table. “I know a woman is supposed to hide her age, but what’s the use? I’m proud to be fifty. I have much to be grateful for, and I’m well aware of it. With luck, I may have another twenty years, perhaps even longer. . . .”

  “Much longer,” her husband said.

  “Well, if you can stand it, I can stand it,” Eleanor rejoined to her husband, and that brought a laugh. “Now once Mary here has finished with the candles, you all must sing to me and then I’ll be done with my birthday. A half a century! That’s a remarkable thing, and at the same time it’s nothing at all.”

  Major Brennan liked Eleanor Heights’s directness. He watched the cake lighting with genuine pleasure. Eleanor pantomimed turning away, then turning back and feigning surprise. Everyone laughed and then broke into a fractured version of “Happy Birthday.” Major Brennan suspected Eleanor had a theater background lurking somewhere in her past. He was going to say as much to his daughter—who stood almost directly across the table, her loveliness in the room a match for the candles—when a woman’s voice spoke close to his ear.