by Dean Hughes
Lorraine smiled. “Dads are all alike,” she said. “But I can’t say I blame him in this case.”
LaRue looked up. “Why? What’s he so scared about?”
Lorraine laughed. “Older boys,” she said, and then she added, “You look just like Wally when your temper flashes like that. Your eyes are exactly like his.”
“It was my dad who always made him lose his temper—the same as me.”
“That’s true.” Lorraine smiled and stepped a little closer, but then she added, quietly, “But Wally always wanted more freedom than he was ready for.”
There was something so serene about Lorraine. Nothing seemed to ruffle her. It was a quality LaRue admired without really envying. “Wally left home as soon as he could. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Then Dad can’t make my decisions for me.”
“Oh, LaRue, be patient about growing up. Sometimes, now, I wish my parents would step in and decide a few things for me. I have some hard decisions to make.”
“Like what?”
“I have a chance to go to Seattle and work for Boeing. There’s a guy we work with up there—he’s been down here a couple of times. He offered me a job at a really good salary. It sounds exciting—and I’d sort of like to get away from home for a while. But it’s scary, too. I don’t know anyone up there.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Lorraine was so beautiful and so likable. LaRue wanted her to be at home when Wally got back. “I hope you stay here,” LaRue said. “I’d miss you if you left.”
“Well, thanks. I’m glad to know you’d miss me. And just remember, you’ll be my age in no time, and then it won’t be as easy to leave home as you think.”
LaRue tried to think what it really would be like. All she knew was that everyone seemed to be on the move, heading to one part of the world or another, and she couldn’t even go out on a date. The thought made her angry all over again.
The Thomases went home in time for an early lunch, and then they walked to the receiving station. They spent the afternoon sorting and processing all the donated paper that people were carrying in. Everyone, of course, knew the Thomases. President Thomas spent half his time that afternoon talking with members of the stake—whispering quietly, settling problems, giving advice.
“What do you hear from Bobbi and the boys?” was the most common question everyone asked Mom.
She would say, “Wally’s still a prisoner of war in the Philippines, but the last we heard, he’s all right. So we feel good about that.” And then she would tell about Alex being in England and Bobbi and Gene in the Hawaiian islands.
There was something to say about everyone except LaRue and Beverly. Nothing exciting ever happened to them. When LaRue’s older brothers and her sister had been her age, they hadn’t been tied down by all the rationing. Activities could never be as fancy now, whether at school or church. And always for the same reason: “Hey, there’s a war on, don’t you know?” Or, “We can’t do that—not for the duration.” And the list of things they couldn’t do seemed to get longer all the time.
When old Sister Bryan, from the ward, came by with some school notebooks, apparently left behind by her children long ago, she asked Mom about the family and got the same report. LaRue turned to Beverly and whispered, “Maybe we could put this on a phonograph record and just play it all afternoon.”
Beverly laughed.
Sister Bryan sighed and said, “I’m happy to hear they’re all right. I lost a grandson in Italy just recently.” LaRue saw tears fill her eyes. “I have too many grandchildren,” she said. “Too many the wrong age. I have five more in the service—and more coming up—and I can’t stand to think that any more of them might be taken. They were all with us, all here close by, and now they’re scattered to the four winds.”
LaRue saw the pain in Sister Bryan’s face, and suddenly she felt bad. She remembered what she had felt on Sunday when she had looked at the big banner on the wall of the chapel. It displayed a blue star for each of the ward members who was serving in the military—like the banners in the windows of homes. Each Sunday LaRue counted the numbers as they grew, and now there were more than forty. What she also looked at were the gold stars at the bottom. Three young men from the ward had died now, and others had been wounded. What she hadn’t thought of were how many grandchildren and cousins and friends there were—whose stars were on someone else’s wall.
LaRue put her arm around Sister Bryan’s back. “I’m sorry,” she said, softly.
“Oh, thank you, sweetheart. You’re such a dear young woman.”
When Sister Bryan was gone, Sister Thomas took hold of LaRue’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “That was very kind, LaRue.”
LaRue knew that her mother worried about her, about her whining and complaining, about her “attitude.” And LaRue found herself wondering which was her real self: the one who felt sorry for Sister Bryan, or the one who resented not having decorations for school dances? Both, she supposed, because her moods jumped from one to the other every day—every hour.
At the end of the big project, when the last of the trucks had been sent off, Dad said something astounding. “Why don’t we walk over to the Marlo this evening and see a picture show?”
LaRue wondered whether that would work. The movie at the Marlo was “Best Foot Forward,” with Lucille Ball and Harry James. It was a lot of singing and dancing, which Dad usually didn’t go for. “Me and Bev saw that one already,” she said. “But we could go downtown.”
“Well, all right. You kids look at the paper when we get home. Pick something out. We’ll drive downtown.”
“What’s going on?” LaRue asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You never want to go to movies.”
“I know. But if we go home, you girls have a way of wandering off with friends, and I read the paper and listen to the news while Mom reads or sews or something. We just need to spend some time together.”
LaRue saw it all. Dad wasn’t feeling good about the “chat” he had had with her that morning, and he wanted to show her, in some way, that he was sorry. Several times lately he had apologized for being gone from home too much, and he had admitted one Sunday at dinner that he had demanded too much of Wally, hadn’t let him grow out of his rebelliousness. He had also told LaRue a number of times that she was a lot like Wally. Dad was trying to do the right thing, and LaRue was touched by that.
“You don’t have to ask twice,” Mom said, and so they all went home and cleaned up, and then they ate a quick supper: homemade soup that Mom had bottled the year before when so many vegetables in their garden had been ready at the same time. She hadn’t baked bread much lately, with all her busyness, and so she put Wonder Bread on the table. Dad usually had something to say about that, but he didn’t complain tonight—and he certainly ate plenty of it.
LaRue and Beverly picked a double feature at the Paramount. “Chip off the Old Block,” with Donald O’Connor, was just as much a song-and-dance picture as the Lucille Ball movie, but the second feature was “Memphis Belle,” a documentary put out by the war department, with actual combat films. The girls thought Dad would like a war picture, in Technicolor. Dad didn’t pay much attention to what they told him, however; he was looking through the newspaper, and he merely said, “That’s fine, girls.”
By the time they got downtown, they’d missed the first part of “Chip off the Old Block,” but the usher helped them find seats, and it didn’t take long to catch the idea. All of it was really quite silly, but LaRue loved it, and Beverly couldn’t stop giggling. Dad hardly reacted at all, and the girls joked between themselves about him being such an old stick-in-the-mud. At the end of it, he said, “We don’t want to see another one, do we? It’ll be awfully late.”
“The other one was the one you wanted to see,” LaRue said.
That was not exactly true, of course, but Dad sat back and didn’t argue, and they stayed—for a while. Bu
t “Memphis Belle” was about a flight crew on a bomber. Dad watched for about half an hour, and then he said, “Girls, I don’t really want to see this. Let’s just go.”
Mom said, “I think I’d rather leave too.”
LaRue was interested in the picture and resisted, but before long Dad stood up and said, “Come on. I can’t do this.” LaRue had no idea what he meant. Everyone was in the car before Dad said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin things for you.”
“Why didn’t you like it, Dad?” LaRue asked.
He backed the car from the angled parking space and then shifted gears and started forward. “There’s something you might as well know,” he said. “The paper tonight said the invasion might be starting.”
“What invasion?” LaRue asked.
“The invasion of Europe. The D day everyone has been talking about for such a long time.”
“Girls,” Mom said, and she twisted in her seat to look into the back seat. “The paratroopers will probably go in first.”
“Oh,” LaRue said, and the significance of Dad’s concern finally struck her.
“So far, it’s just a lot of bombing,” Dad said. “The invasion could still be weeks away. No one knows. But tonight there was a picture on the front page of a Jeep being loaded on a glider—getting ready for the landing, probably in France. That means the airborne troops are getting ready to go.”
“Alex will be all right, won’t he?” Beverly asked.
There was a long silence, and finally Dad said, “We certainly hope so, honey.”
But LaRue felt his dejection, heard it in his voice. No one said another word all the way home.
Chapter 24
The Stoltzes now had the paperwork they needed. Or at least they hoped so. As it had turned out, leaving Germany was much more complicated than Brother Stoltz had known. But his friend from “Uncle Emil”—the code name for the underground—knew much more, and one member of the group was a master printer and an expert at creating false papers. Based on the papers Brother Stoltz had already made, the printer had created passports and identity cards. Now the Stoltzes were on a train heading for Switzerland—except that they planned to stop in Frankfurt. Anna wasn’t sure that was wise, but she felt the same way everyone else did—if they were going to leave their homeland, perhaps forever, she wanted to see her home one more time.
So when the train pulled into Frankfurt, late in the afternoon on Monday, May 29, the Stoltzes first took a streetcar to their old neighborhood, and then they walked down the street where they had lived. They knew they were taking a chance, but it was one they couldn’t resist. They stood a little way off and gazed toward the apartment house. It was not a romantic castle or a country manor; it was merely a blocky gray building, but to Anna, it was magical. It represented a time of life when fear and tension hadn’t consumed their attention. It was also the place where the elders had first come to teach them. She remembered the day when Alex and Elder Taylor had stopped to talk to her, there on the street, not far from where they were standing. She had known by then how much she liked Alex, but she had never imagined that a relationship would actually grow between them.
“It doesn’t seem real,” Peter whispered. “I can hardly remember what it was like to live here.”
Everyone knew what he meant. He was the one who had been so young then, and he was the one who had changed the most. He was filling out, looking more and more like a man. He was seventeen, and yet he had been little more than a child when he had left this home.
But the Stoltzes couldn’t linger very long. They couldn’t be recognized by old neighbors who might happen to know that they were being sought. They only looked at the windows that had been their apartment and wondered who might live there now. Sister Stoltz did admit one element of her pain: “I wonder who got all our things. My dishes and the furniture.”
“I wish we had all the pictures,” Brother Stoltz said.
But these were thoughts almost too painful to harbor, so the Stoltzes walked to the corner and waited for a streetcar, and they took a little journey through the heart of the city. Large sections of Frankfurt had been bombed, but it was operating pretty well. Much of the bombing was on the outskirts of town where there were factories and military installations. Along the Main River, the beautiful old cathedral was still standing, along with the ancient Rathaus, but some of the bridges were gone.
Finally, they did something bold, but something they all wanted to do. They took the streetcar to President Meis’s apartment house. They studied the place and walked by once, just to make sure no one was watching, and then they stepped into the building and walked up a flight of stairs, where they rang the doorbell. In a moment Sister Meis appeared at the door. She looked at the four of them for a second or two before the full realization seemed to strike her. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “Please come in.”
She took Sister Stoltz into her arms, held her for a moment, and then called for her husband. “Are you back with us?” she asked Sister Stoltz. “Will you live here again?”
“No, no,” Sister Stoltz said, but she didn’t explain anything more than that.
Brother Meis had apparently been eating. He came from the kitchen, still holding a napkin in his hand. He stopped and stared for a moment, and then he grabbed Peter, who was closest to him. “My goodness, boy,” he said, “you have grown twice the size you were.”
Brother Stoltz stepped to him. “Go a little easy on me,” he said. “I’ve never mended quite so well as I might like.” But he was laughing, and he hugged President Meis.
“Please, tell us what’s been happening to you,” President Meis said. “We knew from the branch president in Berlin that you were apparently there—but he wouldn’t say much. And then we heard nothing. We feared the worst.”
And so the Stoltzes sat down and rehearsed their story, or at least the parts they could tell.
President and Sister Meis were astounded by all they heard. “But what now?” President Meis asked.
“We’re not likely to see you again,” Brother Stoltz said. “But it’s better if I not say exactly what we have planned. That way you have nothing you would have to hide, should you be questioned.”
“But that means you are still being pursued.”
Brother Stoltz nodded. The others in the family were sitting on a couch, but Brother Stoltz had chosen a wooden, straight-backed chair, which was easier for him to sit on. “Agent Kellerman—the one who harassed you—will never stop chasing us, I’m certain. We know that at one time he was looking for us in Berlin.”
“Someday—when it’s safe—will you let us know where you are?” Sister Meis asked.
“Oh, yes. But that will only come when the war is over.”
“You were right all along about Hitler,” Brother Meis said. “He’s led us into disaster. War on too many fronts. And now we’re going to pay for it.”
“The British and the Americans are getting ready to cross the channel,” Brother Stoltz said.
“I don’t doubt that,” President Meis said, “and Russia is having its way, more and more, in the east. When those two great forces come at us from both sides, I hate to think what will happen to us.”
“Is this what others think? We never dare talk to anyone.”
“I’m never sure. No one speaks out, but everyone can see what’s coming. I hear people complain about the bombing, curse England and America—and I feel that way myself at times—but I think most people know by now that we never should have let Hitler get us into this.”
Sister Meis, who was sitting next to her husband, took his hand in hers. “We lost our Günther,” she said. “He was on the Russian front. He died in all the cold, last winter.”
“Oh, no,” Sister Stoltz said. Anna wondered that young Günther could be old enough to go to war, let alone to have died.
“He was only seventeen,” Sister Meis said. We didn’t want him to go—but there was nothing we could do.”
“Where is A
lene?”
“That’s our great blessing. She married a nice young man—a member of the Church. She lives here in Frankfurt, and she has a little girl. Her husband is in the army, of course, but for now, he’s not in danger.”
“He’s in France,” Brother Meis said. “I doubt it will be a safe place for much longer.”
“It’s all so terrible,” Sister Meis said. “One of the Richter sons was also killed, and Sister Zander’s son lost both his feet to frostbite—also in Russia. The Müllers were bombed out of their house. They weren’t hurt, but they lost everything. And
. . . oh . . . you don’t know about Sister Goldfarb.”
“No. What?” Brother Stoltz asked.
“She was taken away—she and her daughter. Ernst kept in touch with her, helped her a good deal. But one day he went there and she was gone. A neighbor wouldn’t say much, but he did admit that someone—SD or Gestapo, or someone—had come and taken the two of them away.”
Brother Meis said, “The neighbor told me, ‘I suppose you know that she had married a Jew,’ as though that were explanation enough.”
“I won’t say much about this, Ernst,” Brother Stoltz said, “but we were involved in hiding Jews, in Berlin.” He looked down at the floor. “We were tracked down, and the young couple and their little boy were taken. We got out, but they didn’t. We are all brokenhearted about them. You know what the rumors are about the Jews, don’t you?”
“I hear things. But I don’t believe it.”
“I have no proof, Ernst. But I have strong reason to believe that it’s all true.”
President Meis looked at the floor. He didn’t argue. “How can all this happen?” he asked. “How did we allow it to happen?”
“It’s too late to worry about that,” Brother Stoltz said. “For now, we’re merely trying to stay alive.”
President Meis was sitting in an old, worn upholstered chair. He leaned back and let his gaze drift away. “Brother Stoltz, how much longer until men our age are inducted? I always thought my age would keep me out, but Hitler is taking older men all the time.”