“I saw her as being kind and generous when she could be,” he said.
When she could be.
There’s something strange about the rest of the letters.
A few days after my trip to Texas, I retrieve the last box of envelopes from a bookshelf to finish what I had started a few months earlier. I grab a bundle, putting them in order by postmark, May, June, July 1945—and I’m confused. Every letter in May is from Dad. The same for most of June. Mom wrote him every day—where are hers?
July is the reverse: None from Dad until the twenty-sixth, and a month’s worth from Mom that never reached their destination. They came back to her, bearing a version of the same red rubber stamp: a hand with a finger pointing left and the words “Returning to United States. No Forwarding Address.”
No forwarding address? How can the Army not know the whereabouts of one of its soldiers? Was Dad AWOL somewhere in the Philippines?
I flip through the envelopes one by one, day by passing day. Each letter appears well traveled, as the Army Post Office tries in vain to deliver it to Pvt. Julius Luxenberg, #36891866, assigned to the 313th General Hospital somewhere in the Philippines. The markings and cross-outs proliferate as the odyssey continues: “Forward to 132 GH,” usually in red ink; “no record at the 132,” always in black ink; “126 G.H.,” in pencil. In retrospect, it looks ridiculous, but at the time, what choice did the Army postmasters have? Mom faithfully sent a letter every day, and each letter had to travel the same circuitous route, until it finally landed in the hands of someone who seemed to know where the mysterious Pvt. Luxenberg had gone, who wrote: “Evac to USA.”
Evac to USA?
The Army had hospitals all over the Philippines. Dad was serving at one. What could have happened to require an airlift to the States?
And why had I never heard even a whisper about it?
“I’m really beside myself, Duke honey. This is the 8th day without mail. I’m afraid you’re sick…I really don’t know what to believe.”
—July 19, 1945, Mom to Dad, forwarded to 132nd GH on 8/5/45
Frantic. That’s the best word to describe Mom’s growing fear in July 1945 that some catastrophe had befallen her husband.
Truth be told, she had always worried, ever since Dad had written her those desperate letters during basic training, telling her that he was heading toward the “insane asylums.” He had survived, of course, helped by nearly a month in the Camp Wolters hospital while doctors ran tests on his stomach. But Mom’s worry never went away; she just learned to manage it, at least most of the time.
Now, however, she couldn’t hold it in. Circumstances had changed, for both of them. Dad left for the Philippines in late March, taking him out of mail contact for five weeks while the S.S. Monterey made its way to Manila, and out of telephone contact for the duration of his overseas tour. They joked that Dad’s new assignment would save them hundreds of dollars in long-distance charges, but Mom, six months pregnant, was morose at the prospect of not hearing his voice, of not having a way to call him when she gave birth to their child. So in July, when his letters stopped cold, without warning or explanation, she had no way to reach him and no real idea where he was. (She sent her letters to an APO in San Francisco, and Dad, adhering to military censorship rules, only hinted at the 313th’s location in his correspondence.) She was just two weeks out of the hospital, with a newborn turning night into day, and in that vacuum of no sleep and no news, the dam broke. She did what she had tried hard not to do for so long.
She let her imagination run wild.
“I must let it out. It’s 10 days without mail–there aren’t any tears left in me. I am tearing myself apart I am so worried. I can’t stand it…”
—July 21, 1945, Mom to Dad, returned, marked “no forwarding address”
“I’m so scared, so worried…21/2 weeks without any mail.”
—July 25, 1945, Mom to Dad, returned, marked “no forwarding address”
The blackout ended the very next day, a Thursday, July 26, when the phone rang in the Pingree Street apartment and Mom heard Dad’s voice. As Dad spun his story, Mom couldn’t believe what she was hearing: He had been in the States for two weeks, he was calling from a hospital in Kentucky, but he was fine, really he was, and if all went well, he would have his medical discharge in a month or so, and then he would come home, free at last. Weeks of worry vanished in an instant, and she hardly mentioned his disappearing act. “It was like giving a blood transfusion to a very sick person,” she would write him later. “As I have said time and time again, I shall never want for anything when I have you in my arms.”
Then it was her turn. She had so much to tell him: First, that he had a son, Michael Don, now exactly one month old, born on June 26. Everyone was being so nice—Hy and Fran had been taking care of her, Sylvia Pierce and her husband had brought over a bathinette, a handy device with a miniature bathtub and storage underneath for clothes and supplies. Mom had written him all the details, of course, but he had never seen the letters, they were still on their Odyssean journey, caught somewhere between the 313th and the 132nd, having not yet reached the man who would stamp them “Returning to United States, No Forwarding Address.”
Later that night, after putting their newborn son to sleep, she wrote to Dad’s new address, the one he had given her on the phone: Darnall General Hospital, in Danville, Kentucky. “I still can’t stop trembling with excitement and joy—I’m walking on air—It’s so very odd, but dearest one, I knew you were coming home.”
I go through the letter twice, looking for any hint about the reason for his evacuation, and can find none, not even between the lines. Mom merely told him again, as she had on the phone, that he sounded good, and that she had celebrated the news of his impending discharge by going out for the first time since Michael’s birth. Dad’s brothers were in town to see the baby, and a whole crowd of friends and relatives, including Hy and Fran, had taken her dancing. “I had 2 Calverts and you know what two drinks did to me,” she wrote. “I was the life of the party—enjoyed dancing immensely.”
She still hadn’t recovered from his call. “Imagine you being in the States 2 whole weeks without letting me know,” she scolded, “and me knocking my brains out ’cause I got no mail.” Why didn’t he phone as soon as his feet hit U.S. soil? Well, he said, he knew she had probably delivered the baby, that she would be recuperating and getting used to motherhood, and he didn’t want her to worry while she was in the hospital.
Worry her about what? His first few letters didn’t say, and Mom let him off the hook, rebuking him only mildly, reminding him that going AWOL from his wife had made her crazy anyway. But she didn’t dwell on it. Instead, she entertained him with family and neighborhood news—Julie Reisner was getting married and it looked like Hy and Fran were heading to the altar, too. I had long heard how Hy’s decision to marry the non-Jewish Fran had infuriated Tante Hinde, who blamed Mom because Hy and Fran had first set eyes on each other at Mom’s shoe store, but now I was witnessing the origins of Hinde’s life-long animosity. “Tante Hinde and I had quite a run-in about it,” Mom wrote. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it when you come home.”
Dad’s first letters only deepen the mystery surrounding his evacuation. “It’s sure good to feel relaxed and be able to write to you again,” he wrote a few hours after that first phone call. “Talking to you today was worth more to me than all of the medication the U.S. Army could give me…”
Medication? Had his stomach finally developed an ulcer? He didn’t explain. Dad’s letters, usually so straightforward about his failings, now took on an elliptical quality, as if Dad thought that the military censors, who reviewed everything that went out of the Philippines, were still looking over his shoulder.
It was Mom, not Dad, who provided the first clue to the nature of his ailment, an indication that their phone calls were more explicit than their letters. On August 2, she wrote: “Everyone keeps calling up and asking what’s wrong with yo
u etc, etc. I just tell them I don’t know, so they think it’s something wrong with your stomach…So I’ll wait ’til you get home and you tell them some story yourself.”
I could recite the stomach story by heart. I had grown up with it, and that’s the explanation Manny and Shirley had offered when I asked them about his discharge. But if that was the cover story that Dad sold us, what was the real one?
Dad had mentioned in one letter that he ended up at Darnall because it specialized in the treatment he needed. I do an Internet search for “Darnall General Hospital.” It doesn’t exist any longer, but I turn up a 1944 congressional hearing that confirms what I had begun to suspect. “The Army has at the present moment two general hospitals which are exclusively psychiatric. There is one in Danville, Ky. and one in…”
So this was Dad’s secret.
And Mom: After dreaming of castles in the air, of California paradises and starting their own business, she’s left with the reality of a sister permanently residing at a psychiatric hospital in Michigan and a husband who’s a temporary patient at one in Kentucky. Does she fear the future, and what it might hold for her and her savior when he finally returns home?
{ EIGHTEEN }
Uncontoured Ills
Undelivered: Mom’s letter to Dad, July 23, 1945, “No Forwarding Address”
“You worry me a little, (or should I say a lot and be truthful) when you said—‘you’ll see if I’m different when you see me’–for I know you’ve been thru hell.”
—August 5, 1945, Mom to Dad, at Darnall General Hospital
“Without you my life would be empty. I’d be a total loss–and I’m very thankful that I have you to come home to---until eternity.”
—August 12, 1945, Dad at Darnall General Hospital, writing to Mom
The letters make more sense now that I know how to read them. The evacuation suggested some sort of breakdown; the medication Dad mentioned must have been for anxiety, or maybe depression; the hospital must have been evaluating him for a psychiatric discharge. No wonder Mom had trouble fending off everyone’s questions, but fend them off she did. No, she told them, he’s not wounded. No, he’s not injured. Yes, he’s coming home, very soon, it’s just the usual red tape, you know how long everything takes in the Army. In reality, though, Dad had to wait for the Darnall disability board to gather information on him and decide whether he should be discharged.
The waiting tried Mom’s patience. The war was nearly over, and she wanted her Duke back, in part so that she didn’t have to handle the barrage of questions by herself. “Tante Hinde called–keeps asking me what’s wrong with you,” she wrote to Dad on August 7. “I always say I don’t know–it’s rather hard to keep evading the question. Let’s decide on something to tell everybody.”
Meanwhile, Darnall had sent Mom a long questionnaire as part of its evaluation. “This is what it says,” she wrote Dad. “‘In order to arrive at the proper disposition of your relative we would appreciate a summary of his family history, early development, education, habits, character, social and economic adjustment, injuries, illnesses or hospitalization etc.’ It was rather difficult to know what to write, but I ‘dood’ it.”
A week later, two days after Japan announced its surrender, setting off the wildest celebration that Mom had ever seen in her hometown, Dad met with a ward officer, and told Mom everything looked good. “I go before the board on Monday morning…Then, it’s a matter of a week and I hope to be a civilian–the ward officer asked me routine questions, what caused my nervous condition–how do I feel at the present time–what did I do in civilian life–what did I do in the army–how long was I in the service–etc.”
His hearing went as he had hoped. The board declared him disabled, and on September 7, 1945, twenty months after he became a soldier and five days after Japan’s official surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, Pvt. Julius S. Luxenberg put on civilian clothes for the bus ride home. The discharge documents he carried with him did not specifically mention the nature of his disability. When I saw them years later, going through his papers after his death, I assumed that “Certificate of Disability for Discharge” referred to his nervous stomach.
The letters end, of course, just before his return to Detroit, so I have no idea what Mom did to welcome her soldier home. She warned him that she was planning to make a fuss over him, and he warned her that he wasn’t the same Duke who had left nearly two years before. Thinking of the future rather than the past, she told him she had decided to take a part-time job in the evenings at $25 a week, selling shoes for Hy. “Imagine, me working for Hy, how times have changed,” she wrote. “I wouldn’t make a whole lot but it will pull me through on expenses.” Dad wouldn’t hear of it. “What’s this about going to work–I know our finances are a bit low but isn’t it too soon my darling? Don’t you think it’s best to wait a little longer–I know how anxious you are to keep the wolf away from the door–you are one in a million my darling.”
Their last letters still talked of dreams, but more modestly than before—no mention of immigrating to California, or owning their own furniture business, or jukeboxes for Evie to jitterbug the night away. Instead, Dad wrote of wanting “a little bungalow away from the turmoil–a large garden in back–beautiful flowers all around…” Mom matched his enthusiasm for “a place of their own,” but injected a note of pragmatism: “Since housing shortages still exist, I want to start looking around. If we could find an income, how about 5 rooms? It would be nice if we could have a separate room for Michael D…”
So much had changed in the two years since his induction. When he went off to war, he left behind a wife working at a shoe store, two daughters living with their grandmother, and few obligations other than his weekly child-support payment. He returned to a two-month-old son, the likelihood that Marsha and Evie would be coming to live with them for good, no significant savings, and no immediate income beyond his $300 mustering-out pay.
Mom told Dad not to worry, to keep his chin up and his spirits high. She had what she wanted—Duke was back!—and they would face the world together. “I do wish you’d stop worrying about responsibilities and going back to work,” she wrote him on September 2. “It will all work out.”
They would do what they had to do.
More questions for reinterpretation: Did my father’s “disability” continue into civilian life? Did it change him, change how he dealt with others, change his family?
I can’t yet answer all those questions, but I can say that I don’t think it made much difference to the way I grew up. Maybe it helps explain his occasional fits of temper; maybe it provides a context for his restless work history; maybe it helps clarify his paralyzed reaction when Mom had her nervous breakdown. Then again, maybe it doesn’t. Having a temper, changing jobs frequently, and not taking command in a crisis doesn’t come close to the DSM-I,-II, or-III’s definition of psychosis. From my perspective, Dad did what dads are supposed to do: He worked, raised his kids, supported our ambitions. He wasn’t around a lot, he wasn’t easy to know, he had more anger than was healthy, and his stomach bothered him until the day he died, but he took care of his family and his responsibilities. He was a lousy soldier, but he was a good and decent father.
But a psychiatric discharge certainly does help explain, at least for me, why Mom worked so hard to keep him happy, why she tried to shoo away stress, why upsetting Dad ranked at the top of her list of household crimes. She might have taken on that role anyway, like many women of her generation, but I think something happened in Manila, perhaps not something dramatic, and certainly not something permanently disabling, but something that scared Mom enough to become not just Dad’s shield, but his sentry.
What put him on that airlift? Dad’s military records would tell that story, if only they existed. Unfortunately, a devastating fire at a St. Louis government archive destroyed most World War II personnel records in 1973, including my father’s. His letters, however, made it possible to do a targeted search of a set o
f documents untouched by the fire: the “morning reports” of each unit, which detail the daily comings and goings of all personnel. Dad wrote his last letter from the Philippines on June 30, 1945, narrowing the timing of his evacuation to sometime during the first two weeks of July.
The morning reports, when they arrive several months later, do more than provide the date. They provide enough facts to piece together the story of his evacuation.
The 313th General Hospital had to build itself. The military, overwhelmed by the casualties from wars on two fronts, had approved a major expansion of the general hospitals in 1944, and it took seven months for the new 313th to collect, train, and transport its staff to the shores of Manila. The S.S. Monterey arrived on May 1, 1945; a month later, working in tents and with an insufficiently chlorinated water supply, the 313th accepted its first patient. By the end of June, the hospital had beds for 672, and had treated gunshot wounds, compounded fractures, and sixty-three psychiatric cases. “Psychotherapy and narcosynthesis have been used with good results,” the 313th commanding officer commented in his quarterly report. (In narcosynthesis, a controversial technique developed during World War II, a traumatized patient receives a drug such as sodium pentathol to help recall unpleasant or repressed memories.)
Dad had written to Mom about the draining, dirty, debilitating climate. Dehydration posed a constant threat, as did the mosquitoes, which the Army controlled by aerial sprayings of DDT. Dad spent most of May unloading equipment and then wielding a pick and shovel. On May 14, he wrote that he “felt fine”; he was seeing movies every other night, and had loved Rhapsody in Blue, the film about George Gershwin. The beginning of June brought “miserable weather,” constant rain, “so heavy that it came into the tent, and onto my cot.” The heat made everything a steamy mess, and left him wrung out. “Had to change clothes three times today,” he wrote on June 20.
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