The Major's Daughter

by J. P. Francis

  “Maybe if hostilities cease,” August said, his eyes on hers again, “we can sit and talk like any young man and woman. That is my hope. They will send us home eventually, but what will we find? It will all be gone. We are fighting for a dream of what we were.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “May I kiss you again?”

  She nodded.

  He kissed her. This time the kiss expressed longing and sadness. He did not put his arms around her as he had done before. He kept his hand on the horse’s halter. His lips lingered lightly on hers. The kiss still vibrated through her body.

  “Does this horse have a name?” she asked when he lifted his lips from hers.

  “He is known as Crackerjack. What is Crackerjack? The guards could not explain it to me.”

  “A caramel popcorn. Sometimes with peanuts.”

  She thought of the phrase in German. She pronounced it to the best of her ability.

  “Yes, I see. We have such a thing. It’s a funny name for a horse. Now I must go. They will want the horse for the dragging. Crackerjack. We are bringing out logs nearby today. So many trees!”

  She could not help herself. She stood on her toes and kissed him. She was uncertain what she meant the kiss to convey, but she could not imagine letting him walk away without once more feeling his lips on hers. He put his hand against her cheek when she drew back. His hand, she noted, had been roughened by the labor of the last half year. He was no longer the lithe young boy who must have sat at a piano and practiced scales in his Austrian homeland.

  “You are the only good thing to come out of the war,” he said. “My only hope.”

  “And you are mine.”

  “And my friend Crackerjack,” he said, petting the horse a last time and starting away. But she called him back. He walked Crackerjack in a circle and came to a stop in front of her.

  “I nearly forgot,” she said, and she dug in her purse and produced the clover necklace she had weaved. She handed it to him.

  “I ran out of flowers on mine. But this is to make you think of me each day,” she said. “It’s a forget-me-not.”

  “I don’t need it, but I will treasure it. You are in my thoughts always, Collie,” he said, his eyes directly on hers. “I wake to you and I go to sleep to you. It may be unfair to say that I love you, but I do. I don’t know if the world will let us be together, but it can’t change my feelings for you.”

  Crackerjack made a push to get his mouth on the flowers, and August pushed him away just in time. He laughed and petted the horse, then tucked the flowers in the breast of his jacket. He made a clicking sound with his tongue and led the horse in a second loop to get him moving. Sunlight caught the buckles of the harness and reflected back like bright sparks. Collie held her hand up to her eyes to shade them, her back cold from the shade of the pole barn.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Estelle felt a tide of nausea rise and she wondered if she would vomit. She could not predict it any better than if she had been an onlooker. The baby rode inside her like a fish, swimming and doing as it liked, every now and then sending up a disagreeable sensation of nausea and light-headedness, and she despised its willfulness and its sense of timing. Even now, with the painters and paperhangers standing about waiting for instructions, she was not sure she wouldn’t vomit on their shoes. They stared at her, obviously ready to receive instructions, but she was afraid to open her mouth for fear of what chain reaction it might begin.

  She held up a finger to give her a moment, disguising it as though she required a moment of thought when it was merely a noxious swelling in her intestines. Fortunately her mother-in-law came to her rescue and told the men to take a ten-minute break. The men appeared unconvinced, but they backed slowly out of the dining room and Estelle heard them speaking together as they went into the backyard. They spoke Italian.

  “You’re nearly green,” her mother-in-law, Gladys, said. “Come and sit down immediately. I don’t know why these men can’t clean up after themselves. . . . They let everything go so that they can have the satisfaction of uncovering it all at once. . . . It’s a trick to make their work look better than it is.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Estelle said, swallowing her gorge and feeling minutely better.

  “These paint fumes are enough to make anyone feel ill,” Gladys said. “I have the beginning of a headache myself.”

  “I’m okay now. It’s passed.”

  “Are you certain? In your condition . . . I tried to tell George it was too much to take on for an expectant mother. A new house and a baby . . . it’s really too much.”

  “I’ll be fine in a moment,” Estelle said, taking a seat on one of the straight-backed chairs perched around the open living room. She lowered her weight carefully, and the young fish swirled in happiness. She reached into her sleeve and took out a lace handkerchief. She would not admit to anyone what the handkerchief meant to her for fear they would think her strange. But she had come across an antidote for nausea: the scent of hay. For reasons she hardly cared to examine, the smell of hay calmed her and settled her stomach. As a result, she kept a tiny bundle of hay in her handkerchief because no one would think it odd for a pregnant woman to touch her nostrils with a cloth. Now, with the fumes everywhere, and her mother-in-law’s anxious face studying her, Estelle took deep breaths of the hay and thought of barns.

  A second part of her consciousness looked about the house. Yes, it probably was too much, but she had been so eager to leave her in-laws’ home she would have moved into a circus tent if George proposed it. The getting of the house, the bank payments, the risk assessment, the sense George had that this would one day be a “very good neighborhood indeed” had made the acquisition painful and overly long. While other men might simply have decided on a house and purchased it, George, she knew, measured his business acumen by it. It was also an advertisement for him, and so when he had gathered together this band of Italian craftsmen and put them to work finishing the house, she had gone along with it. They had the Duck Pond club, anyway, for meals and entertainment, he said, and so what if they had to bunk out a while with his parents? A penny earned, and all that.

  He had underestimated the baby, however, and she had tried to make him understand what a pregnancy entailed, but he was not attentive in that way. Faced with an economic uncertainty, or a question of finance, he was unmistakably the man for the job. He drew a line between the world of men and the world of women, she reflected, and was not fully aware of their intersection. Gladys, Estelle knew, saw this feature of her son, and, to her credit, did what she could to make him pay attention. Gladys, too, was in a tricky position, Estelle realized. She did not want to be the meddlesome mother-in-law, but at the same time she had somehow become responsible for her daughter-in-law’s health and welfare. It was all quite exhausting.

  “I think the blue, with carriages . . . the one they showed us in the store. We have several rolls of it here somewhere,” Estelle said, aware her eyes were looking far away while her mind percolated with the details of decorations. “For the dining room . . . how do you think that would look?”

  “Oh, very nice. You know best.”

  “And a cream for the living room. Maybe the wainscoting in the dining room should be cream as well to draw the colors together. That would match and lead the eye. . . .”

  “Oh, yes, yes, I see just what you mean.”

  Poor Gladys, Estelle mused. If George was Eternal George, then Gladys was his opposite, a sort of hummingbird-of-a-woman who lived on lettuce and air. Her slimness made her easy to bully, a horrible propensity that Estelle had discovered in herself. As she grew denser with the child, she felt she could command anything from Gladys, and that, she knew, was unconscionable. She had written to Collie about it and confessed everything, but Collie, as usual, dismissed her friend’s capacity for cruelty. Collie, in certain ways, was to
o innocent for her own good, Estelle had concluded.

  “Yes, I think that should be all right. If you wouldn’t mind calling them . . . ,” Estelle said. “I’m feeling back on my game now.”

  “Yes, of course,” Gladys said, and hurried off to call the men.

  Estelle heard her pigeon voice, and then the men returned. The foreman, a heavily mustachioed man named Anthony, came forward to take the instructions. Estelle knew the man did not think much of her. She had picked up a few words from his quick Italian—as much the tone as anything—that had disparaged her choices. She had inquired several times of George about who these men were, why were they not fighting the war, where had he found them? He had brushed aside all of her questions, insisting they should use them while they were available, and it was this sense of an under-the-table deal that colored all of her exchanges with Anthony.

  “I think the carriage wallpaper for the dining room,” she said, watching his eyes. “With a cream wainscoting. Then, if you please, we’ll have the cream duplicated on the living room walls. . . .”

  “Si, signora.”

  “Will that look all right?” she asked, testing him.

  “Yes, very nice. No . . . ,” he said, but apparently could not think what else he wanted to say.

  “Yes?”

  He lacked the word for trim, she realized, because he walked over and pointed to the doorframe.

  “Uno color?” he asked.

  “He thinks there should be a trim color,” Gladys said, staring at him as though he were a bear on a bicycle.

  “He may be right. We can decide that later,” she said directly to Anthony, “once we see the paper on. We don’t want it to look like a bordello in here.”

  She used the word bordello to get a rise from Gladys, and it worked. The tiny woman blushed.

  Estelle waited while Anthony issued instructions to the men. They deliberately showed no expression. She finally decided not to care one way or the other. She stood and went with Gladys to make a quick inspection of the work so far. That was part of the established routine. She would go through the house, trailed by Gladys, making mental notes of what remained to be accomplished. Under different circumstances, without a fish exercising in the natatorium of her stomach, she might have taken more pleasure in the details. Once she had the notes, she did her best to explain them to Anthony or whatever tradesman happened to be responsible for the construction.

  Today, however, she performed a cursory inspection. As soon as she had made a lap around the downstairs—she did not bother with the upstairs, which felt, at times, like yet another country to conquer—she pronounced the progress bene to Anthony. He nodded and asked a question about the color for the kitchen cabinets. They had been over it before several times, and she realized he did it simply to annoy her.

  “It will all be fine,” she said, gathering her coat and Gladys. “It’s all looking very good.”

  “I don’t know where George gets these people,” Gladys said once they had stepped outside. “I really don’t. I think he enjoys the underworld feeling about them.”

  “Maybe George is a gangster,” Estelle said, watching the shock spread on Gladys’s face. “You never know. I read an account in McCall’s about a woman who was married to a man who had killed three women in their own basement. Anything is possible, Gladys.”

  “In their own basement?”

  “Yes. A bloodthirsty man, apparently. After she had gone to bed, he had roamed around in the darkness like a modern-day Jack the Ripper. Very gruesome. You don’t think George could be involved in something like that, do you?”

  “Oh, Estelle, of course not!”

  Estelle took her mother-in-law’s arm as they went down the porch steps. The porch was the element of the house she liked best. It was wide and wrapped all the way around the house in a Victorian style, she supposed, but it always struck Estelle as a skirt held out in a curtsy. It required no effort of imagination to envision summer evenings on the porch, lemonade and fireflies, perhaps neighbors out for walks casually dropping by. George had promised her a porch, and he had made good on the promise. She gave him that much.

  At the street curb she turned around and studied the house. She tried to see it apart from its surroundings. George had plans to build half a dozen houses along the street with his partners. It was an odd thing to see this kind of construction given the choked supplies most citizens experienced. But George had his ways; trucks came and went, and she could not believe it was all quite on the square, but she didn’t question it too sharply. She imagined George stood to make a tidy fortune at the war’s end. As he said, people would return and begin making families, and it was not war speculating at all. It was merely being ahead of the curve, he said, and so the muddy yards and the cement foundations up and down the street—he gave her permission to name the street as long as it was something American-sounding and she had called it Persimmon Drive—suggested progress and forward-thinking. They would be rich, she knew. Not rich as her father was rich, but rich in a way that would satisfy George, in a way that would make money almost beside the point, and she was not sure what she felt about that.

  “The March weather makes it all look rather tentative,” Gladys said, sharing Estelle’s view beside the car. “But we shouldn’t judge anything until the landscaping is finished. George says he has a very good man for the job . . . a man who worked on some of the most prominent parks in Europe.”

  “Of course George does.”

  “I don’t know how he learned to do all this, but he certainly keeps himself busy.”

  “He certainly does.”

  “Building houses for people . . . In the end, that’s rather noble, isn’t it?”

  “As long as he’s not burying corpses in the foundations,” Estelle said, sliding in behind the driver’s wheel and reaching across to spring the passenger door for her mother-in-law. “As long as he’s not doing that.”

  • • •

  “The Russians are cutting the arms and legs off the German dead and feeding them to the livestock,” Gerhard said at lunch break, a slender stalk of grass bobbing in his mouth as he spoke. “That’s the report. It’s done for now. Everything is lost. We’re better off here. It’s going to be a horrible business before it’s all finished.”

  “Hitler should surrender,” Patrick said, spitting the words. “He’s become a laughingstock.”

  Patrick was the young boy now in charge of the twitch horses. The other two members of the cutting team, Emmet and Liam, had gone with the guards back to camp for a hot lunch. August preferred to stay in the woods; the sun was warm and pleasant, though it had turned everything underfoot to mud. Now it was late March and spring sunshine crept over the mountains each morning and the river smoked in the increasing warmth like a train waiting to leave.

  “He’ll never surrender,” August said. “It’s not in his character. He has promised to shoot anyone who speaks of surrender.”

  “That’s what the American news reports say,” Gerhard said. “We can’t believe everything that we hear.”

  “Do you doubt the Germans are on the run? The Allies have crossed the Rhine now. It’s a matter of days or weeks.”

  “The Russians will retaliate,” Patrick said. “My grandfather said they have tails, some of them, like wolves.”

  “Your grandfather has read too many fairy tales,” August said. “But they are wolves, true enough. They’ll rape anyone they can.”

  “The German girls cover their faces with grime and coal dust to make themselves look older,” Gerhard said. “The Russian authorities will do nothing to prevent the rapes. It’s always been that way between us.”

  “Between the Germans and Russians?” Patrick asked.

  Gerhard nodded.

  August ate a piece of sausage wrapped in a mouthful of stale bread. He had not remained in the woods through lu
nch hour to hear yet another account of atrocities. In the beginning there had been a dreadful fascination to the subject, but now it seemed ghoulish to speculate about the circumstances in Germany. The conditions were dire, certainly. No one disputed that any longer. The last residue of Nazism had disappeared from the barracks. No one performed the Deutsche Gruß, the Nazi salute, with anything less than irony. It was humiliating to see it, to think that it ever held significance.

  It was a fine noon, August made himself note. That was something for which to be grateful. He was always on the lookout now for something to count on the positive side of the ledger. Many of the men agreed that New Hampshire was a place they had come to love. Perhaps love was too large a word to apply, August reflected, but he admired the land, the green woods, the mountains that stretched off to the east. As a sort of parlor game, the men had often asked one another: if the authorities permitted it, would they remain in the United States rather than return to Germany or Europe? August had always answered in the affirmative, although only under the proviso that he could travel home to see his mother and father and his brother first. That would be his primary mission once the war ended.

  “We should go to Canada,” Gerhard said absently, tapping a stick on one of the logs they had cut that morning. “We’ve talked about it. We’ve talked it to death. We should go. Others have made it.”

  “And others have been shot dead in escaping.”

  “Who has gone to Canada?” Patrick asked.

  August eyed Gerhard. It was a plan they had talked about repeatedly, and he wasn’t sure whether they should take Patrick into their confidence. August doubted the boy would tell, but you never knew. War had taught him to shut his mouth. Nevertheless, the cat was out of the bag, and it was not exactly a secret that the men had talked of Canada as if it possessed the answers to everything, a Shangri-la where life could regain its flavor. August shrugged. Gerhard explained it to the boy.