On October 27, 1943, he was inducted; less than two months later, on December 17, he was on his way to basic training, leaving Mom in tears at the train station. On Christmas Day, he wrote to her from Camp Wolters in Texas, his first letter home: “I miss you, will write soon as possible don’t worry love I am in the infantry Duke.” Soon, she was vowing to join him. “No Army, no mileage, can keep us apart,” she wrote.
Before the week was out, he sent her an SOS. “This cycle, which is 17 weeks, is too much for me. I can’t take it. I didn’t want to tell you this, but I guess I have to. I don’t know how to get out—somehow it seems impossible. If you know of any way at all, try to see what you can do. This is worse than jail.” He complained that his stomach was acting up. “Try and help me…answer immediately.”
I never knew much about Dad’s military service. When he talked about his war, he didn’t talk about the Philippines, where he had served for several months in 1945; he talked about his ailing stomach and aching back. It didn’t matter to me; I was proud that he had served at all. When my friends and I swapped stories about what our daddies did in the war, I was part of the club, and as a Jewish boy growing up in a largely Catholic neighborhood, belonging was more of a challenge than standing out.
But it wasn’t until I began to read his letters that I came face-to-face with the raw depths of his unhappiness. The Allies won, but he failed—at least, that’s the feeling that oozes from the letters he wrote during the winter of 1944. If I found them hard to read, I can only imagine what Mom felt, particularly that February 2, 1944 letter: If I stay much longer I’ll be in the insane asylums.
Even if Dad meant it as hyperbole, it must have hit Mom like a shock-wave to read those precise words. So she did what any woman concerned about her man would do: She did everything she could to break his melancholy, buck him up, boost his ego—to bring him home in as sound a condition, both body and soul, as she could.
“I have been elaborating on our plans for our house. Remember the one we drew up—I’ve been thinking I want two sets of couches, what do you think; also I think we ought to have a juke box in the recreation room so Evie can jitterbug—don’t say it sweetheart—building castles in the air is very beautiful, as I sit here and write I can feel you beside me discussing our home. What seems a foolish fancy today becomes a wonderful reality tomorrow, and tomorrow always becomes today eventually…”
—January 24, 1944, Mom writing to Dad at Camp Wolters
She dreamed for both of them.
The war raged on, endless in her mind, her new husband more than a thousand miles away at basic training, wretched in his new life as a soldier, and still Beth Luxenberg managed to dream. She had no illusions about the likelihood of her dreams coming true—“don’t say it sweetheart, building castles in the air is very beautiful”—but in her letters to her beloved Duke, now Pvt. Jack Luxenberg, #36891866, she tried hard, sometimes desperately hard, to keep up his plummeting spirits.
When he hinted darkly after a month of basic training that he might go AWOL, she cajoled him: “Don’t feel badly—stronger men than you haven’t been able to make it.” When he begged for help, she haunted the Red Cross office in Detroit, urging the agency to investigate his medical condition and determine whether anything could be done to get him out. When his repeated bouts of diarrhea and stomach pain sent him to the hospital with a suspected ulcer, she got herself on a train to Texas to stand by her man in person. After tests showed no ulcers and a psychiatrist declared him fit for active duty, she told him to do his best and “not be ashamed to complain about your stomach again.”
He left the hospital with a special dispensation that excused him from the most arduous basic-training exercises—the fifteen-mile marches, the five-mile speed hikes, the fully loaded pack—and then lucked out with an assignment to a new medical hospital still getting itself organized for overseas deployment. He would spend the fall at a base outside Tacoma, Washington, rather than with an infantry unit on the bloody fields of Europe. But when he learned that his medical unit training would include several more weeks of field maneuvers, he adopted a new strategy for survival. “Every hike or speed march that we have, I’m falling out—they can stand on their head, I’m not taking them.”
To distract him, Mom often wrote about the future—about the house they might buy, the furniture they might own, the furniture business they might start together. She shared their entrepreneurial ideas with her boss at the shoe store, and reported his enthusiastic endorsement to Dad. “We rode home on the bus together and were talking of post-war days. I told him how much we’d like to be in business for ourselves—the furniture business. He thinks it’s a marvelous field.”
The war had disrupted everyone’s life and everyone’s spending patterns, and this offered a wonderful opportunity for a smart entrepreneur. “Darling, I wonder if you can visualize how wonderful,” she wrote. “When peace comes, furniture will be their first item, plus of course electrical appliances—refrigerators, radio, etc. Darling, God only help us to have the money. We could fall into a fortune—the right spot!”
California loomed large in this future. They dreamed about joining the exodus to that state, especially after Dad visited Hollywood on his way to a base near Monterey. “Honey—Hollywood for you and I after the war—and I don’t mean perhaps—it’s the most loveliest place—ideal for you and I—real paradise.”
“People sure have money like mad in this town—prices are ridiculous—the streets are jammed—restaurants have lines outside—and you should see the line-up for buses—boy oh boy this lousy war can never end too soon for me—they can keep all the money—Just send me home my baby, and I’ll live in Traverse City on $20 a week.”
—May 16, 1944, Mom writing to Dad at Camp Wolters
She sent him something—a note, a letter, a card—nearly every day, except for a two-month period in late 1944, when she took an apartment in Tacoma, about fifteen miles from where he was stationed at Fort Lewis. After several days of reading her daily letters nonstop, I felt as if I had taken up residence in wartime Detroit; I could see the people in the crowded streets and feel the economic hustle and bustle that brought the city out of the Depression for good. The assembly lines had ramped up to a level of work not seen since 1929, manned by workers from other Midwestern states and the South. The migration significantly and permanently changed Detroit’s racial makeup, as the black population boomed along with the rest of the city. “You know baby,” Mom wrote Dad on April 23, 1944, “I think there are 1,000,000 more people in Detroit—everywhere you go there are crowds—more crowds—shopping is a nite-mare—every entertainment place is filled to the gills—even the 30% Federal tax on liquor has no effect—people have money to burn.”
Money to burn, but not necessarily places to spend it. Money alone couldn’t buy rationed items like shoes or sugar or film. Movie theaters did a landmark business, though, for two reasons: People needed to laugh as they followed the often harrowing news from Europe and the Pacific, and no one needed a ration stamp to take in a show.
At the downtown shoe store where Mom worked as a manager, business had extreme highs and lows. At times, the store had so few customers that she wondered why she had opened at all. Then a shipment of “unrationed” shoes would come in, and she would have to hire extra help to handle the hordes. After the arrival of seven thousand unrationed pairs in January 1944, she had to work fourteen-hour days to keep up with the demand for the shoes, on sale for $3 each. “What a day,” she wrote Dad on January 22. “We chained the doors to keep the customers out—shoes thrown all over the place…women yelling oh nuts…I was wrapping shoes so fast I couldn’t breathe.” She arrived home near midnight, giddy about the extra commission money she had earned from selling $75 in shoes, and so exhausted she could hardly muster the energy to take a shower.
But she had one last task to complete before she fell into bed. Taking several sheets of thin, government-rationed airmail paper from her drawer, she w
rote her nightly letter to Dad, all the while staring at the photo that she kept on her bedside table.
“Please believe me darling I want to know everything good or bad. If you can’t tell your wife, who can you tell? I know what a terrible time you’ve been having and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
—January 24, 1944, Mom to Dad at Camp Wolters
The letters, of course, aren’t just a narrative of life in Detroit or a running conversation between two lonely people separated by circumstances beyond their control.
They are also love letters.
Mom, in particular, had a fondness for the mushy, and by the time I reach March 1944, I’ve become quite familiar with her terms of endearment and euphemisms. One phrase, which she often uses to close her letters, stands out; it is not part of the usual lover’s vocabulary: my savior.
In my head, I have my own running conversation with her:
“It’s okay for me to read the letters, isn’t it? Otherwise, why did you save them and leave them for us?” I ask.
“I don’t mind you reading them,” she replies. “Just be careful.”
“Careful?” I say. “Careful, how?”
She hesitates. “We were in love.”
“I know that, Mom.”
“Love is what matters,” she says.
“Can I ask you one question? At the end of many letters, you call Dad ‘my sweet baby, my savior.’ What was he saving you from?”
No reply.
I’ll have to imagine the answer for myself.
The letters are making me sick. I had scoffed when Sash warned me that she couldn’t read the letters because they reeked of mold and cigarette smoke after more than thirty years in Mom’s small apartment. After several days with them, I can feel the musty smell settling in my throat, and my itchy nose tells me that my allergies are acting up. But I keep reading, looking for leads. Unfortunately, Mom’s not writing to assist a reader sixty years later. As might be expected, she refers to friends by first name alone, and doesn’t mention any identifying details, such as where they’re living.
I wearily take out the envelope for December 1, 1944. And there it is:
Sylvia Pierce had all the girls out to her house—you know the one that lives on Steele. There was—Irene, Faye, Julie, Molly and Sandra—by the way Sandra is pregnant again, that’s Goose’s wife—she’s in her 8th, that’s no. 3. We had a nice time—oh well as good as can be expected. I don’t enjoy much without you.
Sylvia Pierce. Not Pearce, as the obit in the Detroit Library had spelled it. I jump on the Internet, and discover that this is the right Sylvia Pierce—and that she had died just two weeks earlier, at the age of eighty-six. I’m disconsolate. Why hadn’t that obit writer at the Free Press gotten her name right back in 1952? But at least I’ve cracked the circle. I’ve got a specific name to pursue.
I dial the home of Sylvia’s daughter-in-law, Connie Pierce. I apologize for bothering her, and tell her I’m sorry about Sylvia’s death. I explain that my mom and Sylvia were friends from long ago, and that I’m trying to trace others in their group for a book I’m writing. Connie tells me that Sylvia probably couldn’t have helped me if I had found her earlier—Alzheimer’s had taken possession of her memory in the last year.
I tell Connie about coming across Sylvia’s name in Mom’s letters. She’s caught up in the detective hunt. “If I read you a paragraph from December 1944,” I say, “can you tell me if you know any of these other women, and whether they’re still alive?”
As soon as I finish, Connie says, “Yes, I know them all—all except your mom. What did you say her name was?”
There’s one question I’d like to ask Mom as I get deeper and deeper into the letters. Where’s Annie?
Her first letter is dated January 1, 1944. Her last is postmarked September 5, 1945. So far, I’ve made it to the end of March 1945, when Dad ships out to the Philippines and their correspondence goes on hiatus during his five-week voyage. Thousands of pages of prose exchanged between them, and not one sentence about Annie.
The letters pick up again in early May, which means I still have another four months’ worth, a week of reading at least, but I decide to take a break, grateful that Connie Pierce has given me several promising leads to pursue. When I started my marathon reading sessions, I had hoped that I would find some reference, some allusion, even if it were just Mom telling Dad that, oh, yes, by the way, Annie’s still the same, there’s no change, or guess what, Ma (as she called Tillie) went to see Annie and she’s doing a little better. But at some point, I can’t really say when, I realized that my expectations had reversed, that I now assumed that I would consume every word of every letter, all the way to the final onion-skin page, and that Annie wouldn’t be there. One afternoon, after extracting one letter after another from their musty envelopes, I even muttered out loud, “C’mon, Mom, something must be going on with Annie.”
I couldn’t imagine that nothing of significance had happened to her sister during those eighteen months that Dad was away. By 1944, Annie had been living at Eloise for more than three years. Maybe it was clear by then that she had become a permanent Eloise resident, but even permanent residents make progress, or take turns for the worse. I was pretty sure, based on what Anna Oliwek had said, that Tillie visited Annie periodically during the 1940s. Annie might have been gone, but she wasn’t forgotten.
I couldn’t understand Annie’s absence in the letters. Maybe Sash was right—maybe Dad didn’t know about Annie. Or maybe Dad knew all about Annie, but Mom had declared the subject, painful and embarrassing as it must have been, off-limits. That certainly seemed possible. Mom had no reason to inform Dad about Annie’s progress; after all, Annie was Mom’s sister, not her daughter, so Mom wasn’t responsible for her. Eloise was taking care of Annie, and Mom’s job was to take care of her despondent soldier-husband, who had more than enough on his mind. No need to worry him about a mentally ill sister-in-law whom he had probably never met.
But if he didn’t know about Annie, then what to make of this sentence from Mom’s letter on August 5, 1944, a sentence that concluded with a long description of her anger at Esther, who has come back to town and disrupted Mom’s Sunday outings with Evie and Marsha? “I have been avoiding saying anything for I didn’t want you to know how I felt,” she wrote, “but then we never keep things from each other.”
Never?
{ ELEVEN }
The Old Neighborhood
Girls’ day out: Mom and Marsha, age two, Pingree Street, 1943
“Sylvia Pierce had all the girls out to her house—you know the one that lives on Steele. There was—Irene, Faye, Julie, Molly and Sandra…”
All it takes is one—one name, one address, one correct piece of information—to wipe away weeks of frustration. Within a few days of talking to various members of the Pierce extended family, I’m able to piece together a working list of every one of the women mentioned in Mom’s letter. According to Connie, the entire group had remained friends throughout their lives, all except Mom.
“Faye” was Faye Levin, almost certainly the Faye from Mom’s photos, and she had married someone named Emmer. “Molly” was Faye’s sister, and I knew from Mom’s letter that Sylvia had “all the girls out to her house” to celebrate Molly’s wedding, but Connie doesn’t remember Molly’s married name. Sandra was Sandra Goose, already married to Dave Goose and expecting her third child. Irene and Sylvia were the Robinson girls, whose family had lived next door to my grandparents on Euclid during the late 1930s. Irene had married David Doren after divorcing her first husband, so the Free Press obit from 1952 had been right on Irene’s married name.
And Julie: Her maiden name was Julie Reisler or Reisner, the only one still alive as far as anyone in Connie’s circle knew. Julie was somewhere in California, but Connie didn’t have a phone number or any clues about how to find her, and there seemed to be some confusion about her current last name.
While I’m hunting for the elusive Julie, Lau
rie Brodie Green, another Pierce relative, suggests her mom, Millie, might be worth a call. Millie Brodie was Irene’s and Sylvia’s first cousin, and spent a lot of time at the Robinsons’ apartment when she was young. Laurie says she’ll call her mom to see if she remembers my mom.
“Tell me your mom’s maiden name again,” Laurie says.
“Cohen. Beth Cohen.”
The following day, Laurie calls back. “At first she had no idea who I was talking about. ‘Beth Cohen, Beth Cohen,’ she kept repeating. Then I mentioned her sister, and her wooden leg. That did it. She laughed and said, ‘Oh, you mean Bertha. She changed her name to Beth later. That’s why I didn’t remember.’”
“You speak such beautiful Hebrew.”
I plaster on a smile and say thank you to all my well-wishers—thanks a lot, I’m glad you liked it, yes thanks, no I’m not studying Hebrew right now, sure, thanks again. I don’t know what else to say and it isn’t just because I’m sixteen and awkward about compliments. It seems rude to tell them, sorry, I’m a fake, I actually don’t know a word of Hebrew, all I did was memorize these lines and I borrowed this tallit (the traditional prayer shawl) for the ceremony so, please, stop shaking my hand and giving me kisses and telling me how well I speak.
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