by Dean Hughes
“That’s what we said. But Bobbi, I need someone to love me. No one has ever loved me.”
“I guess that’s what I want from Richard, too.”
“Well . . . if you want him, go after him.”
“I’ve tried. A little. But any time I get personal, he gets scared. That’s when he shuts up.”
Twice now, after church, Afton had claimed that she had other things to do, and she had left Bobbi and Richard alone. They had gone for walks, and Bobbi had enjoyed the time together. So had Richard, it seemed, but he had never said anything that implied they were becoming more than friends.
Afton stood up, and she looked directly into Bobbi’s eyes. “Richard is probably just being careful—being sure, before he says anything. And you’re doing the same thing.” She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. “Maybe it’s time to take a step forward. Tell him how you feel. Or just kiss him and see what happens.”
“Oh, sure. He’d jump in the ocean and swim to San Francisco.”
“Naw. Richard would never go AWOL. He’s too reliable to do something like that.”
Bobbi laughed, and then she began to walk toward the back doors of the hospital. Afton got up and followed along, but just before they walked inside, she said something that haunted Bobbi afterward. “If both of you keep waiting for the other to say something—or do something—he’ll be gone, and neither one of you will know how the other one feels.”
That same week, on Thursday, after Bobbi got off work, she walked next door to the nurse’s quarters. She had put in a twelve-hour shift, from six in the morning until six at night, and she was exhausted. She walked down the hall in her robe, took a shower, and then returned to her room. Afton had apparently been held over at the hospital. That happened sometimes in post-op.
Bobbi decided to wait for her before she walked to the mess hall to eat. She was lying on her bed when a little knock came at the door. “Bobbi,” a voice said, “there’s an officer down at the front desk. He said he wanted to see you.”
“Officer? What officer?”
“Lieutenant Hammond is his name. He’s a tall guy. Nice looking. He said something about—”
“That’s all right. I just need to throw something on. Could you tell him I’m coming?”
“Wow. Sounds pretty exciting.”
Bobbi couldn’t believe this. But she was suddenly up and moving. She tossed on a little cotton flowered dress and then slipped on a pair of sandals. In five minutes she was heading out her door. But she slowed as she approached the stairs, and she tried to appear rather casual about Richard’s being there. “Hi,” she said, from the stairway, and he stood up.
“Hello,” he said with that mellow voice of his. He waited for her to approach. He was actually wearing a Hawaiian shirt—white, with blue and yellow flowers—and sunglasses. “I got a chance to borrow a car—and I thought it would be a nice time to take a little drive. I didn’t know what shift you were on, or whether—”
“I’d love to go for a drive.”
“Have you ever seen the north shore?”
“No. I’ve been dying to drive up there. I’ve never even had a chance to see the temple.”
“Do you need to . . . get anything?”
“No. But I ought to leave a note for Afton. Or did you want her to go with us?”
“Well, actually . . . I hadn’t had that in mind.”
“Okay.” Bobbi fought hard not to smile. “I’ll just run up and leave her a note. She hasn’t come in yet. We both worked the day shift today.”
“Sounds good.” He smiled.
“Okay.” And this time she smiled fully, with more satisfaction than she wanted to grant this guy who had never come around and had now shown up without warning.
Bobbi hurried to her room and actually worried that Afton might show up before she could get away—and Richard, out of politeness, would ask her to go along. But she merely wrote, “Gone with Richard for the evening. Don’t think it, and don’t say it when I get back. It’s just for a ride.”
But that’s not what she was thinking. The truth was, he looked awfully good, with his hands in his pockets and his flowered shirt draping over his slim hips.
The car was something of a relic—an old Ford—but it was a convertible, and of course perfect for the weather and for a drive of this kind.
“I’ll bet you’re really beat,” Richard thought to say as he opened the door for her. “Do you have to be to work at six in the morning?”
“No. Tomorrow is my only day off this week.”
“Well, you’re luckier than I am. I have to be up early in the morning.”
“We don’t need to go clear out to—”
“No. That’s all right. I’ve been wanting to get off the ship for a long time.” He was talking as he walked around the car, and then, when he got in, he looked over at her and smiled. “I think our flowers clash a little,” he said.
Bobbi looked into those blue eyes, which seemed almost silver in the late-afternoon light, and somehow couldn’t think what he had said. “What?” she finally asked.
“My shirt and your dress.”
“Oh.” She laughed. “We look like a garden, don’t we?”
He started the car. “I’m a little self-conscious wearing something like this,” he said. “I had to borrow it from one of the other officers. He told me that’s what I had to wear if I was going to drive a car like this.”
“You look great, actually.”
Richard looked away, shifted, and then backed out of the parking spot.”I know this car is a jalopy, but the air feels great.” He drove slowly to the exit gate. Once out on the highway, however, Bobbi felt the flow of the air in her hair, and she did love the freedom she suddenly felt.
Richard drove on the little highway through Honolulu and then continued toward Diamond Head and around the east side of the island. He took his time and let Bobbi enjoy the view. It was also easier to talk when they didn’t drive too fast. They stopped for a few minutes to look at the Blow Hole, near Koko Head, and then continued around Makapuu Point and on north. By the time they reached Laie, the sun was going down, but the temple looked beautiful in the fading light, with the reflecting pools glowing.
After, they drove on to Waimea Bay. It was dark by then, but a bright moon was coming up, and Richard parked the car. “Let’s just go out and sit on the beach for a few minutes before we start back,” he said.
“I’m worried that it’s getting too late for you.”
“That’s okay. I’ve gone two or three days without sleep sometimes. I get by all right. This is the closest I’ve been to freedom in a long time. I don’t want it to end.”
But Bobbi was pretty sure he was talking only about the beach and the lovely air—the sound of the waves. As usual, he had not said anything very personal all evening. He did sit fairly close, however, and for a time he gazed out at the reflection of the moon on the waves. “This is one thing we could have used in Springville,” he said. “A nice ocean.”
“What about Utah Lake? Wasn’t that good enough?”
He laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you what. This is a beautiful place, but I’d trade straight across, right now, if I could go home and stay there.”
“Is that where you want to live after the war? In Springville?”
“Not necessarily. But probably in Utah.”
“And do what?”
“Maybe go back to college.”
“I thought you were finished.”
“I was. But I don’t want to stay in the navy now, and that was always my plan. And I’m not that interested in engineering.”
“So what would you study?”
“In a way, I’d like to be a teacher, but it’s hard to raise a family on a teacher’s salary.”
“Is that what you want? A family?”
“Of course.”
Bobbi heard the finality in his voice, as though he were saying, “But I don’t want to talk about that.” And so sh
e moved back to the first subject. “What would you teach?”
“Math, maybe. But I doubt I’ll do that. Nothing is very clear to me right now. The end of the war doesn’t seem real to me. I can’t seem to think that far into the future.”
“I used to think about teaching at a college.”
“Literature?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“I don’t know. One part of me says that I’d rather read novels and poetry—and not deal with the real world. Other times, I feel like nursing is the right thing for me. Today a young sailor left the hospital—a boy named Stanley. He had gotten burned in an explosion on his ship, and he really didn’t want to leave. But he told me I’d helped him through all these awful weeks he’s had to survive. That made me feel like I’m doing something worthwhile.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
Bobbi heard a surprising amount of concern in Richard’s voice. “Well . . . it’s going to be rough for him. He’s really quite disfigured.”
“It happens all the time, you know,” Richard said. “A lot of sailors get burned. I think I’d rather die than have my body mutilated like that.”
“Don’t say that. Stanley is such a nice kid. After I got used to how he looked, I didn’t think much about it. People will just have to take the time to get to know him.”
“But it’s one thing for a nurse to handle that sort of thing. Do you think a girl could ever fall in love with him?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
Richard seemed to let that run through his mind for a time. Bobbi glanced at him, saw the silhouette of his face in the moonlight. Suddenly she didn’t want to talk. She wanted him to kiss her. But Richard said, “I think you should be a teacher. Or a professor. You’d be good at it.”
Bobbi was frustrated. She knew he was only looking for something to say. “Maybe,” she said, “but on a day like this, after what I experienced with Stanley, I don’t want to think as much as I want to touch.”
Richard chuckled.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said, and she laughed at herself. “It’s just that I’ve always thought so much about everything. I wish, in a way, I were more like the Hawaiian women in our ward. They seem to savor life now, not worry themselves to death about the future.”
“But it’s hard to savor life, the way it is now. And who knows how many of us will even have a future? Or how many will end up like your friend Stanley.”
That stopped Bobbi for a moment. She finally had a clue to Richard’s reticence. “But that’s just it,” she said. “The war should force us to look at the basics. Life and death. Isn’t it better to experience the good things than to put everything on hold?”
When Richard didn’t say anything, Bobbi kept waiting; she wanted to hear his answer. Richard shifted his weight so that he was leaning mostly on one arm and a little closer. “Bobbi, I have this sense that a kid named Richard Hammond once lived in a place called Springville, Utah,” he said. “But both the boy and the town are gone now. And it doesn’t seem possible to get either one of them back.”
“I don’t see that. The war will end. That’s why we’re fighting—so we can have all the good things we remember.”
“But I’ve seen things I never knew existed. It’s hard to believe I’ll ever be the same person again.”
Richard lay back on the sand, and Bobbi turned to look down on his face, visible now under the moonlight. Her impulse was to drop all this talk and to follow Afton’s advice: just kiss him and see what happened. But she couldn’t do that, so she asked, “Don’t you have to keep believing in good things? You believe in the gospel, don’t you?”
“Sure. And I try to keep that perspective in my head. I also try to believe that Richard Hammond is still in me somewhere—and will return. But it’s a fight for me right now.”
“Springville is still there. I saw it not too long ago.”
He laughed. “I left a girl in Springville. She promised to wait for me forever. But she fell a little short. She didn’t last six months.”
Bobbi felt some relief to hear that, but the words had some sting in them too. “So that’s made things worse, I guess.”
“No. I don’t think so. At least now, when I go back to sea, I won’t have to worry about her. Last time out, I always wondered, if something happened, how much it would hurt her. I think it’s better, when you go into battle, not to leave any connections behind.”
He looked at her intently, and they both knew what he was saying.
“Will you be shipping out soon?”
“I don’t know. And if I did, I couldn’t say. But it can’t be too much longer.”
Bobbi wanted to challenge him, tell him that “connections” were the only thing that mattered. But she could see in his face that he wasn’t going to say anything more than he had said. What she did sense was that he knew more about his feelings than he claimed; he was choosing not to reveal what he knew about himself. She was almost sure he cared for her, too, but he was not going to say so.
They stayed there together for quite some time, Richard lying back on the sand and Bobbi looking out at the waves. Neither said a word. Bobbi felt her frustration turning into sadness. There were so many ways to be a casualty of this war.
Chapter 17
When the air-raid sirens sounded, Anna didn’t panic; in fact, she rolled over in bed and groaned. But then she remembered, and fear stopped her breath. All through the latter part of July and into August, Hamburg had been devastated by an unprecedented torrent of bombs, and now Berliners were expecting the same kind of attack. American and British bombers had struck Hamburg night and day for well over a week. So many phosphorus bombs had dropped that at times the flames sucked all the oxygen from the air, causing hurricane-force windstorms that fanned the fires into white heat. The pavement in the streets had burned, turned into rivers, like lava. Tens of thousands of civilians had died.
Then, on August 1, Allied planes had dropped leaflets on Berlin with a warning for women and children to leave the city. Everyone assumed that Berlin would be next—and many children were sent to the country. But how could women leave? They were the ones keeping Berlin running, the ones staffing all the war production factories.
Anna slipped out of bed and gathered up her light summer Feder Decke, and then she hurried down the stairs. She and her parents and Peter, without saying anything, walked to the corner of the basement. Other families from the apartment building were finding their way to their own usual spots. The basement was cooler than their third-floor apartment on this hot August night, and really quite pleasant. Anna curled up on top of the feather tick, but she didn’t fall asleep as she sometimes managed to do. She waited and listened. Peter was next to her in the dark, and she couldn’t see him clearly, but she heard his breath, coming unsteadily in tense bursts.
And then the bombs began to drop—closer than usual tonight but still a mile or more away. Anna wasn’t frightened by these first explosions. She had been through these raids many times; she could judge the distance. She knew that a single bomb would probably not reach the basement unless it was a direct hit. What she feared was that these bombs were the first of thousands, that the firestorms would begin here—and destroy the entire city.
The explosions had a kind of rhythm, and Anna had learned to read the patterns. The bombers were moving past, not toward them. That was good, but a parallel pattern was likely: more planes, dropping bombs along another strip. The Stoltzes lived on the edge of town, and not very close to any major railroad lines or factories, which helped, but the choice of targets was not easy to explain. However much Anna disliked what Hitler and the Nazis had done to Germany, she still struggled to understand why the British and Americans bombed residential areas. She knew, of course, that Germany was doing the same thing in England, and perhaps had even started the civilian bombing, but it was still infuriating to see whole neighborhoods destroyed without a strategic target anyw
here close.
“Is it beginning?” Sister Stoltz whispered to her husband, and Anna knew what she meant, what she feared.
“I don’t know. It seems quite the usual thing, so far,” Brother Stoltz told her.
“They’re a long way off,” Peter said with confidence, and Anna knew he was trying to show that he wasn’t afraid. In the past few months he had finally grown taller, and soft hair was appearing on his cheeks and lip. Anna loved the way he was trying to assume his role as a man, which for him seemed to mean that he had to be brave—a protector to his mother and sister.
Anna lay still and kept listening for more bombers. The airplanes seemed a kind of enemy themselves, like birds of prey, coming in hordes. The irony was, the effect of all this bombardment was to unify Germans. No matter what people felt about Nazis, resolve to keep the defense plants operating was only heightened. Anna had seen her own munitions factory blown apart and three days later, after a monumental effort by employees, open again. Conditions were terrible, with rebuilding still going on as assembly lines operated, but the workers, without pressure, seemed to raise their level of effort.
Anna, herself, wanted this war to end in a way that would bring her old Germany back, and she knew that would require the Allies to win, not the Nazis, but she also loved the dedication that kept things going, and the people’s loyalty to each other. She wondered whether the victors, these men in the bombers, could ever understand that.
At least when the bombs fell, everyone hunkered down together. At all other times, the Stoltzes had a bigger worry: that they might be recognized for who they really were. There were no further reports of Kellerman poking his nose about in Berlin, but the Stoltzes still dared not attend church, and Brother Stoltz always told the family to stay together, to avoid personal friendships, and to be careful about anything any of them might say. Worst of all, Brother Stoltz was working with the underground on a steady basis now. He said little about it, but Anna knew he was constantly making false papers for Jews who were hiding in the city, and somehow he was getting those papers to his contacts. At any time he could be caught, and the Gestapo would strike at the family quickly and decisively.