Jimmy's Stars

by Mary Ann Rodman

  “Drink up, kid,” said a man’s voice. “You’re gonna need it.”

  “Get away from him,” Mrs. Kozelle barked, swatting away the bag.

  Several little Jelineks, with runny noses and dirty faces, huddled in a corner sobbing. Mrs. Kozelle crouched to talk to them. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Ma’s in the bedroom,” the biggest one snuffled. “With the min’ster man. They said to go away.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t mean it,” said Mrs. Kozelle. “Let’s go find her, shall we?”

  With a little Jelinek holding each of Mrs. Kozelle’s gloved hands and another clinging to Ellie’s mitten, the group threaded through a rabbit warren of rooms. Far away, Ellie heard someone wailing.

  The wail grew louder as they moved deeper and deeper into the house. Finally, Jellyneck and Mrs. Kozelle shoved through a crowd at the end of a hallway. Ellie and Stan pushed after him until they were in a bedroom.

  Mrs. Jelinek sat on the bed, rocking back and forth, moaning in an unearthly voice. Reverend Schuyler stood before her, an open Bible dangling from his hand, looking helpless.

  “Ma!” Jellyneck screamed, throwing himself on her. “What’s wrong?”

  But Ellie knew. At Mrs. Jelinek’s feet lay a telegram. Ellie could see the first words, “We regret to inform you…”

  Orrie was dead.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Day turned to dusk. Dr. Atkinson arrived and gave Mrs. Jelinek a calming shot. Someone went down to the Do-Drop and dragged Mr. Jelinek home. More people crowded into the house.

  Ellie and Stan took Jellyneck to the kitchen, the only room not jammed with drinking men and weeping women. The three friends sat at the table, staring at the scarred top. Ellie tried to think of something to say. “I’m sorry” didn’t seem like enough.

  “A jeep accident,” Jellyneck repeated over and over. “Criminy. A jeep accident.” He didn’t cry. He didn’t even sound as if he might cry. Stunned, Ellie decided. Orrie was in New Jersey. He wasn’t supposed to die in a jeep accident.

  The room grew darker and darker until Ellie could no longer see the water rings and nicks in the table. No one turned on the light. Somehow, the dark felt safer.

  That’s where Ellie’s mother found them, Mrs. Kozelle at her heels.

  “What are you doing sitting in the dark?” asked Mom, pulling the light chain.

  “Humph,” said Mrs. Kozelle, banging open cabinets, poking her head in the icebox. “Not a scrap of food in the house. Come on, Stan. We’re going to get some food together. Oscar, you come too,” she added.

  “I wish there was coffee,” Mom muttered. “Those men surely don’t need any more whiskey or whatever they’re drinking.”

  With the light on, Ellie saw the room clearly for the first time. And the baskets. Wash baskets. At least a dozen of them.

  “You think the Jelineks do this much wash?” Ellie fingered a sheet. Linen, much finer than anything the McKelvey household had ever slept on. And shirts. Cotton so soft it felt like silk. Then another basket, filled with rough towels, some spattered with blood. Blood?

  Then she saw the note pinned to the shirt. Atkinson. No starch. Deliver Monday.

  Mrs. Jelinek took in laundry.

  “Jeez,” Ellie said. “How come we didn’t know?”

  “Pride,” said Mom. “Taking in laundry is what the poor do.”

  From the front of the house, the sound of bottles breaking and a fight starting.

  “Let’s go,” said Mom, ushering Ellie out the back door. “Things are getting out of hand.”

  Late that night, Ellie awoke to a faint thump-thump-thump. Throwing on her robe, she tiptoed to the basement.

  Mom stood with her back to the stairs, running sheets through the wringer. At her feet were baskets and baskets of laundry.

  Dr. Atkinson’s laundry.

  “It figures,” sneered Victoria on Monday. “Only a Jelinek would die in a jeep accident.”

  “Hey, that’s mean,” Stan said. Still, Ellie had to admit it did seem like such an ordinary way to die.

  “He won’t even get a Purple Heart,” mourned Stan. “If only he’d flipped that jeep in a combat zone.”

  For three days, Jellyneck’s empty desk stuck out like a missing tooth in Room Seven. On Thursday, he came back to school.

  “Nobody cares what I do anyhow,” he said. Ellie fought the urge to say “So what else is new?” Jellyneck’s face looked like a mask, clean in the middle, grey at the edges where the washcloth missed.

  “You mean you coulda stayed home?” asked Ralph. “Are you stupid?”

  Jellyneck shrugged. “Between home and here, I’d rather be here.”

  Miss Granberry only said, “Oscar, get your missed assignments from Stanley.”

  When Stan, Ellie and Jellyneck walked home that afternoon, the hearse from Moore Brothers Funeral Parlour was parked in front of the Jelineks’. The neighbours watched from their porches as Mr. Moore and his men negotiated the casket out of the hearse and up the slippery walk and steps. Mrs. Jelinek stood in the doorway sobbing loudly, the littlest kids clinging to her skirts.

  “I guess we’re having the wake tonight,” said Jellyneck. “If somebody can get Pa out of the Do-Drop.”

  He looked so forlorn that Ellie said, “We’ll come to the wake, me and Stan. Won’t we, Stan?” She gave Stan an elbow to the ribs.

  “Oh yeah, sure,” said Stan.

  Jellyneck’s face brightened. “Really? You’d do that?”

  “Sure,” said Ellie, with a casualness she didn’t feel. “What’re friends for?”

  “Have you gone squirrelly again?” Stan asked Ellie as they slip-slid their way home. “Our folks are never gonna let us go to a wake at the Jelineks’. They’d sooner let us go to the Do-Drop.”

  “We’re doing this for Jellyneck,” Ellie pointed out.

  Their mothers not only agreed to let them go to the wake, they went with them. It was last Saturday all over again, with adults and teenagers in the yard passing around bottles in bags. Ellie felt like Miss Goody Two-shoes in her Sunday dress and shoes, picking her way around men and boys in work clothes and overalls who had had too much to drink.

  “Gosh, I hope we don’t have to hunt all over for Jellyneck,” Stan whispered. “Those folks look rough.”

  They didn’t have to. Jellyneck was waiting at the front door.

  “Can I take your coats?” Jellyneck said, as if he were hosting a party. “Do you want to see Orrie?”

  No! thought Ellie. I’ve never seen a dead person and I don’t want to start now.

  “He looks swell,” Jellyneck went on. “They fixed him up good.”

  “Okay,” said Stan. “Sure thing. Where is he?”

  “This way,” said Jellyneck, leading them through the crowded room, the mood somehow jovial. Like a party where the guest of honour just happened to be dead.

  The open casket stood under the windows, but nobody paid Orrie any attention. People talked and laughed and drank. Only Mrs. Jelinek acted sad. She slumped on a spring-busted sofa, surrounded by women patting her hands.

  “C’mon,” Jellyneck urged Ellie. “Go see him. He looks good.”

  Someone – the Moore Brothers? – had placed torch lamps on either side of the open casket. Ellie had hoped it would be too dark to really see. Her gaze flitted around the room, stopping at the flag draped across the closed end of the casket. On to the torch lamps. Then the tattered lace curtains on the windows. Anything to avoid the open coffin, lit up like a Hollywood premiere.

  Jellyneck squeezed Ellie’s hand. “Just like he’s sleeping, don’t you think?”

  Ellie gathered her courage and peered into the coffin. She stared at Orrie’s hands, the nails buffed to a soft sheen, the way they never were in life, and the shiny buttons that marched up the front of his olive drab jacket.

  Ellie took a deep breath, and let her gaze travel up to his face.

  It wasn’t Orrie.

  At least not the one Ellie
knew.

  Even in the soft light, she could see the undertaker’s heavy hand with pancake make-up, rouge and lipstick. Ellie couldn’t believe they put lipstick on a soldier. Orrie looked like a doll, with rosy cheeks and lips.

  “Oh yeah,” said Stan in a hearty voice. “He looks swell. Not banged up at all.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Jellyneck.

  Ellie’s stomach lurched, and panic rose, like smoke from a rapidly kindling fire. She wanted to flee; she was too close to the fire.

  But it wasn’t Orrie who scared her.

  It was Jellyneck. He was touched by death.

  And death was something that Ellie did not want to get close to.

  Ever.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  So today is the first official day of spring, Ellie thought as she stomped icy snow crusts from her boots on her front porch. Ha! March 21 in Pittsburgh might just as well be January. She pulled off a mitten so she could reach into the mailbox. Bills, bills, and a letter from Jimmy!

  Saturday, March 11th, 1944

  Dear Movie Star,

  England is the berries! Strawberries, that is, in the summertime. I can’t wait to taste their strawberries and cream.

  Max and I have made friends with a family named Whitehurst, Mama, Papa and two Miss Whitehursts. There’s a son, too, named Clive, who is off in the Royal Air Force. One of the girls, Priscilla, is just your age. Whenever we get liberty, they invite us for supper and Mr. Whitehurst takes us to his pub, The Rose and Clover, to play darts. A pub is like the Do-Drop but without Mr. Gandeck singing to the jukebox.

  Speaking of singing, have you heard “Mairzy Doats”? Some new guys brought the record with them. I hear it’s a big hit in the States. I am practising so I can embarrass you when I come back.

  I spend a lot of time emptying bedpans, drawing blood and such, nothing exciting on that front. I do have a funny story, though. This general (I can’t tell you who, but he’s famous) was visiting the wards, handing out Purple Hearts to fellas injured in the line of duty. He asked each man how he was injured. “I was in the first wave that landed at Anzio.” “I was shot in North Africa.” Then the general comes to this guy who has just about every square inch of his body bandaged, both legs in traction…you never saw anything like it. The general says, “Soldier, where did you see action?” The soldier says, “Piccadilly Circus, sir. I got hit by a London bus on liberty, sir.” It was hilarious, although I feel sorry for the fella.

  Love,

  Jimmy

  Ellie leaned against the porch rail holding the letter, blood pounding in her ears. When she’d thought of Jimmy taking blood or emptying bedpans, she had forgotten the most important part. Patients. Wounded soldiers who had been at Anzio or North Africa. The ones that she never saw on newsreels at the Liberty, or in Life magazine. Those soldiers looked tired and dirty, but healthy. Not wounded.

  Thank you, God, for sending Jimmy to a nice safe hospital in England.

  Nobody shot guys carrying bedpans.

  “Sam and Donnie want to join the service,” Jellyneck said to Ellie and Stan, as the class pulled off their snow boots in the Room Seven cloakroom. “They want to take Orrie’s place.”

  “As a jeep driver?” Ralph asked.

  “Nah. They’re hoping for some real frontline action. A shot at Hitler or Tojo, maybe.” Jellyneck blew on his purple fingers to warm them. No gloves, Ellie noted.

  “Really?” said Stan, eyes alert behind his spectacles. “What are they joining? Army? Navy? Marines?”

  “But they’re only high school freshmen,” said Ellie.

  “Sam’s a freshman, Donnie’s a sophomore,” Jellyneck corrected. “They want Ma to sign some papers saying they’re seventeen.”

  Ellie remembered Buddy Gandeck’s friend Tennessee. “What did your mom say?” she asked.

  “She said a lot of things,” Jellyneck said with a twisted smile. “Mostly that she and Pa weren’t signing anything, and the boys could wait until they got their draft notices when they’re eighteen.”

  “What did they say about that?” Stan unwrapped his scarf and slung it on a coat hook.

  “‘Aw, Ma, the war will be over by then.’” Jellyneck carefully draped his new jacket on the hook.

  “And your ma said…” Stan prompted.

  “‘That’s what I’m counting on.’”

  Spring arrived ever so slowly in Pittsburgh. Even though the calendar said April, winter lingered on. The cinder-crusted snowdrifts dwindled, then grew tall and white again with new snow. The sidewalks were always wet, and so were Ellie’s feet as her galoshes sprung bigger and bigger leaks. Ellie knew better than to ask for new rubber galoshes; there weren’t any. Every night she cut new cardboard insoles for them, and every afternoon she took them out, wet and ruined. Spring couldn’t come soon enough for Ellie.

  “Time to put in the garden soon,” Mom said, paging through the Burpee seed catalogue. Ellie knew Mom wasn’t going to plant in the snow. She meant it was time to plan this year’s Victory Garden.

  “Early Jewel, June Pink, Jubilee,” Mom murmured, studying the pages at the kitchen table as Ellie cut new insoles. “Golden Queen, Marglobe.”

  Ellie sighed. How could such pretty names be for tomatoes? Ellie hated tomatoes with a passion. She didn’t like them raw, fried, or stewed. Especially not stewed. Besides, tomato plants were a pain to take care of.

  “Golden Queen it is.” Mom, on the other hand, loved tomatoes. Every year the garden seemed to be two-thirds tomatoes, and a few rows of other things like snap beans and cucumbers and turnips.

  Ellie looked down a long vista of hot summer days of hoeing and weeding and picking off bugs. And for what? A lot of turnips and tomatoes. It hardly seemed worth it. Maybe she could wait for spring after all. Ellie sighed, and fitted the insoles into her boots.

  On Macken Street, the first sign of spring was not the first robin or daffodils. The first sign of spring was Mr. Green’s scoreboard. The first day of baseball season, he always hung the chalkboard with DRINK COCA-COLA across the top, just outside the store’s front door.

  “It’s spring!” Ellie and Stan said, checking the score of the Pirates’ first game of the year. Never mind that it was 42 degrees and a stiff wind shot straight through their jackets. It almost didn’t matter that Pittsburgh lost to St. Louis 0–2 that first game. Win or lose, baseball meant spring.

  Right after that, the school turned off the heat. Warm or not, every year the furnace stopped running on April 20th. Miss Granberry opened the windows, and the cold breeze scoured away the winter smells – wet wool and Vicks VapoRub and months of Victoria’s salami sandwiches.

  Open windows made it harder for Ellie to concentrate. Every little sound grabbed her attention. Bicycle bells. The janitor emptying trash into the rubbish barrel. The flag flapping on the pole out front.

  Ellie was trying to ignore those sounds one late April afternoon as Miss Granberry explained how to figure interest on a bank account. She might as well have been speaking Latin, for all that Ellie understood. It was the warmest day so far, and Ellie could hardly keep her eyes open, let alone listen to Miss Granberry go on and on about compound interest.

  Slam! Slam! Ellie’s drooping eyelids jerked open. Car doors? In front of the school? Who would drive to the school, especially so late in the day? Who drove at all, any more? Dr. Atkinson, Reverend Schuyler and…

  “Holy Toledo!” Victoria shouted, leaning out the window. “It’s Mr. Wheeler, and some lady.”

  “Sit down, Victoria,” Miss Granberry said. Whatever else she said was lost in the rush of sixth graders stampeding to the windows.

  Ellie peered over Stan’s shoulder. Sure enough, the Western Union man’s elderly Ford was at the kerb. Mr. Wheeler and a woman in a housedress and apron hurried up the school steps.

  Who is that lady? Ellie wondered. She was too old to be the mother of a student.

  “Uh-oh,” said Jellyneck. “Somebody’s getting bad news.”

  Miss
Granberry marched over to the sixth graders, all pressing for a better view. “Sit down, all of you,” she rasped, shepherding the students back to their desks. “If you are going to act like first graders every time that…” Her voice trailed off as she looked out the window. She hastened to the hall door, then turned towards them.

  “I’m leaving for a bit,” she said. “Bridget will be room monitor.”

  And then she was gone, leaving the door open.

  “Whaddya think?” Stan whispered to Ellie. “You think that telegram is for Miss Granberry?”

  Ellie shook her head. “She doesn’t have any relatives, I don’t think.”

  “Stan, Ellie, I see you.” Bridget noisily chalked their names on the blackboard.

  “Oh, blow it out your barracks bag,” Ellie said.

  Bridget hastily erased the names.

  Victoria sauntered over to the door and looked out.

  “See anything?” Stan asked.

  “Nope. No, hold on a second.” Victoria motioned for the class to hush. Ellie heard the clop click of adult shoes on the polished floors.

  “Who is it?” Bridget asked, forgetting she was in charge.

  Moving back in the doorway, Victoria peeked around the doorframe. “Miss Deetch, Miss Granberry, Mr. Wheeler and that lady, whoever she is. And they’re coming this way.” Victoria flung herself back into her seat.

  The room sat in dead silence, waiting, waiting, for…for what? Click clop click clop. The steps came closer and closer and…stopped. The sound of knocking on a door. The door creaking open, then shut. Mumbled voices.

  Then, the scream. The scream that sounded the same, no matter if it was a man, woman, or child.

  Ellie put her head on her desk and covered her ears. When will the war be over?

  By school the next morning, everyone on Macken Street knew that Mr. Miller, the fourth grade teacher’s husband, was lost at sea. Suddenly, Mrs. Miller’s students were the most popular kids in the schoolyard, as the other kids pumped them for information.

  “That lady with Mr. Wheeler,” a fourth-grade girl told Ellie and Stan, “was Mrs. Miller’s mother. Mrs. Miller’s staying with her while her husband is overseas. Was overseas.” The girl sounded confused. “Alls I know is we got a substitute for the rest of the year.”