by Dean Hughes
Dinner was overwhelming, with more food on one table than Anna remembered ever seeing: a large ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, a green salad, fresh peas and carrots, hot rolls and butter, pickled beets and cucumbers, black olives, and a wonderful cherry Kuchen that Sister Thomas called a “pie.” And with it came lots of talk, lots of laughing, lots of questions for the Stoltzes. By the time President Thomas drove the family to the “little house” he had promised them, Anna was exhausted. But the house was anything but small. It was a wonderful brick home with three bedrooms, a nice kitchen, and a big living room. It was like a palace compared to the little flat they had lived in in London.
Anna and her parents thanked President Thomas over and over, but he seemed embarrassed about that. He kept changing the subject and showing them around the house, into the spacious basement, and out into the garage. And then he said, “You’re going to need a car, and that’s something I can get easier than anything. I’ll figure something out and get one up to you.”
“But President Thomas, I don’t drive,” Brother Stoltz said.
“You’ve never driven a car?”
“Perhaps a little, a long time ago. But wouldn’t I need a permit of some sort? I hardly dare drive on these streets with so many cars about.”
“That won’t be a problem. You’ll learn fast, and it’s not difficult to get a driver’s license. Don’t worry about that. I’ll see to it.” And he was off.
After, when the Stoltzes were finally alone, they all looked at each other as though they still didn’t believe what had been happening all afternoon. “Can we do this?” Sister Stoltz asked. “Can we live in a house like this and not pay them anything?”
“We will pay,” Brother Stoltz said. “We’ll work, and we’ll pay.”
“They are so rich. They have so many cars. And such a house. I don’t know what they will think of us.”
“They love us,” Anna said. “They’re just trying to help us.”
“Sister Thomas is wonderful,” Sister Stoltz said. “I never had such a close friend in Germany, and I’ve only known this woman for one afternoon.”
“They are very rich, but they are very good,” Brother Stoltz said.
Anna looked at Peter, who still looked nervous, concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He sat down on a chair, a large comfortable upholstered chair that was clearly new. “Yes. I’m fine,” he said.
“Will you be happy here?”
He looked confused by the question, but he seemed to consider it for a time. “They’re very noisy,” he said.
Everyone laughed. “But it’s a good noise,” Brother Stoltz said. “They’re our brothers and sisters, and our in-laws too. They have already accepted us into their family.”
Peter nodded. “I like them,” he said. “But how can we be like them?”
“We can’t. But it doesn’t matter,” Brother Stoltz said. “Think of what we have here. In Germany we would have nothing now. We are blessed to be here with jobs, with a house, with everything.” When Peter didn’t answer, he asked, “Isn’t it so, Peter?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“What’s the matter then? Are you homesick?”
“I’ve never had a home,” he said. “Not since I was a boy.”
Brother Stoltz said softly, “I know, Son. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that. It couldn’t be helped. But still—I don’t know where I belong.”
Anna understood, of course, and she worried about Peter. “You must try,” she said. “You can make a home now, finally.”
But he didn’t respond.
“You’ll be all right in time,” Anna told him. “Everything will be good for you here.”
Anna wanted to believe that, but she also knew that Peter was going to have to find his own way through his doubts.
In bed that night, when Gene had settled down next to Anna and was breathing steadily, still too wary to go off to a crib, Anna tried to think about her own future. She loved the Thomases and she liked Salt Lake City, and she felt blessed beyond belief to have this house to live in. Alex would be here before long, and she would have everything she had dreamed of. She held Gene close, trying to bask in this joy, but it all made her rather nervous. Was it really possible for life to be so perfect?
Chapter 16
Wally was sitting at his office desk, trying to make some headway with his paperwork. He looked up when one of his foremen stepped to the door. “Wally, we’ve got a problem,” he said.
Wally looked back at his desk for a moment. He entered the last number in a column, pulled the arm on his adding machine, and then wrote the results on the form he was filling out. “What’s the matter, Ken?” he finally asked.
“We’ve been making casings all morning for those Bendix motors, but they’re out of tolerance, every one of them.”
“Did you check all the settings?”
“Yes. And they’re all exactly right. I can’t figure out what’s going on.”
Wally nodded. “Let’s go have a look at it.” He was glad Ken had had the good sense to check with him before he started fussing with the gauges. Ken was new, and he was a good man, but he had served in the navy all during the war, and sometimes, on ship, sailors learned to keep engines going any way they could—with a hunk of wire or a matchstick. This fine-tuned machinery couldn’t be handled that way.
The truth was, Wally especially liked getting away from his office. He always felt satisfied when he cleared his desk—processed all the paper and got rid of it—but he didn’t like the tedium of the work itself. He really liked being out on the floor, and he liked seeing the actual parts come off the line, buffed and ready to ship. He liked talking to the workers, too, and above all he loved to solve problems. This new one sounded interesting, something that would be a challenge to figure out.
In recent months the work force in the plant had changed drastically. Wally was hiring lots of men who were home from the war, and they were happy to get the work. More and more of the young women who had worked there were getting married, or the married ones were shyly announcing to him that they were expecting and needed to stay home now. But some wanted to stay, and Wally was glad they did. These women had been running the machines longer, had the experience, and he didn’t need a whole shop full of novices. He noticed that men who returned from something as sloppy and haphazard as war had a tendency to say “That looks close enough” rather than understand the tiny tolerances allowed in making interchangeable parts.
Wally spent an hour down on the line, and as usual, when he found the problem, it was actually a simple one. The machinist had read the spec sheet incorrectly. It took Wally a few minutes to explain the problem, but he loved that moment when the machinist, a young fellow named Monte Payne, and Ken Horsley, the foreman, both saw the point at the same time. “Oh, yeah, I was looking at the wrong drawing,” Monte said, and Ken nodded and said, “Now I got ya.”
“Well, it’s an easy mistake to make. We’re making parts for several different-sized motors. You’ll get used to these spec sheets when you’ve worked with them more.”
“Yeah, I think I will. I’m sorry I messed up all them casings this morning.”
“It happens,” Wally said, but he didn’t want to be too easy. “Ken, you do need to keep on top of that. We really should have caught that right off—before we made up a whole batch of bad ones.”
“I know. I had some things come up, and I didn’t get back to the line for a little while.”
For a time the three talked about the inspection process. Wally liked the decision that came out of the little talk, and he liked the way Monte and Ken reached an agreement without his saying too much. He even liked the way the men called him Wally, thanked him, joked a little as they began to reset the machinery. By the time Wally left the floor he was feeling that he was getting pretty good at what he did, and mostly that he liked it—liked solving the problems, liked dealing with the workers, liked being a crucial p
art of a well-run operation.
He walked back to his office—and then on by. He stepped to his mother’s door. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“Not too bad. At least I don’t feel like I’m in over my head all the time, now that you’re around here.”
“We had a little problem on the line, got some motor casings off-sized, but I figured out what was going wrong.”
“See. Now that’s the kind of thing I just had to leave to the foremen. I never have been much help with things like that.”
“The difference was, you had a crew of foremen you could rely on. Since we started expanding, we’ve got way too many new guys around here.”
Bea was wearing her reading glasses. She took them off now and leaned back in her chair, smiling. “Wally, I just never get over how much I like having you around here. Every time I hear your voice in the hallway, I think, ‘That’s my boy, and he’s home.’”
“It’s funny. I don’t think about that so much anymore. It’s all starting to seem normal to me—even having a girl in bed with me.” He laughed.
“Hey, that wife of yours is nothing less than a dream come true. Don’t you forget it.”
“You don’t know the true Lorraine, Mom. When I get home, she’s still got her hair up in curlers, and all she does is cuss me out and nag at me.”
“She doesn’t either. Don’t you even say such a thing.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she’s the sweetest girl in the world—except for dear Anna. I’ve fallen in love with her already. Isn’t she wonderful?”
“I haven’t been around her as much as you have, but I sure like her, Mom. And that little Gene, he’s a spitfire.”
“He’s so much like our Gene was at that age,” Mom said, and Wally saw her glance away for a moment. But then she added, quickly, “They’re all such good people. How are Heinrich and Peter doing with their jobs?”
“I don’t see Peter much. He’s down in the shipping department all the time. But Richard says he works really hard, and he’s starting to relax a little. He tries to speak some English once in a while now.”
“What about Heinrich?”
“Well . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure he’s cut out for machinist work. But he sure tries hard.”
Mom usually wore an old gray cardigan over her dress when she worked in her office. She pulled it together now and began to button the front. It was April, but the weather had turned cold and rainy. There was even some new snow in the mountains. “I just wish we could get Alex home now,” she said. “Now that Bobbi’s getting married, I feel better about her. But I won’t feel like the war is really over until we get Alex back.”
“When is it going to be over for you, Mom? I thought you’d quit working down here by now.”
But Wally thought he saw a bit of a reaction, maybe a little spark of annoyance. Mom glanced away from him and shrugged. “If I dropped all this paperwork on you right now, you’d be screaming for mercy in a week,” she said.
“I know that. But we could get someone hired, and you could start training him.”
“Or her.”
Wally smiled. “Yes. Or her.” And then he had a thought. “What about Heinrich? Could he do it?”
“I don’t know, Wally. Would his English be good enough to handle all the technical words he’d have to know?”
“He could learn that fast enough, I would think.”
“Well, maybe. But there’s so much to it—all the government regulations and the way you have to word everything.”
“So what are you saying, Mom? That no one else could ever learn your job?” He asked the question in a serious voice, but then, after he gave her a moment to think, he smiled.
Slowly, Mom let herself smile too. “I think maybe that’s it, Wally. I want to think that no one else could do it—that I really am needed around here.” She leaned back in her chair, as though she had decided, for just a moment, to separate herself from her work.
“I doubt that anyone else will do it as well, Mom. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to get out of here.”
Suddenly she leaned forward again. She pointed her finger at Wally and said, more seriously than he expected, “You sound just like your dad.”
“What do you mean?” Wally stepped inside the door and shut it behind him to block out some of the noise. In a softer voice, he asked, “Did I say the wrong thing?” She really had seemed a little upset with him.
“You just can’t imagine that I might enjoy the work and want to stick around. What’s so great about knocking around my big old house—especially when the girls are gone? And that won’t be much longer now.”
“But a lot of times you sound like you’re really tired of this place.”
“Who doesn’t? All the men around here complain, and no one tells them they ought to go home and do housework.”
Wally laughed. He sat down on a chair near the door. The old building always smelled of grease and sweat and metal shavings; he couldn’t imagine how his mom had stood it for all these years. “I think I’’d better stay out of this one,” he said. “All I know is, as long as you want to stay, this company is better off.”
“But is our family better off if I stay home? I could tend Gene more often—and any other grandchildren we might get some time.” She cocked her head a little and looked at Wally with a question in her eyes.
“Don’t look at me. I can’t have a baby. Lorraine has to do that.”
“Maybe somebody hasn’t told you about the birds and the bees yet. You have something to do with getting those babies, you know.”
“Really? Tell me how that works.”
“Shush. But tell me the truth. Would we be better off at home if I quit down here?”
“I don’t know. I really have no idea. But I think it’s your decision and no one else’s.”
“Thanks for that. I don’t think your dad looks at it that way.”
“Does he want you to stay home?”
“You know he does. He doesn’t say it to me, but I know he thinks it’s wrong for me to be down here when men need work. What he does tell me is that it ‘looks bad’ for his wife to keep working.”
“Well, like I said, I’ll leave that up to you. But I wouldn’t let Dad decide for you.”
“Do you decide things for Lorraine?”
Wally laughed. “I occasionally submit my recommendations, and then she gets back to me with the right answer. But she retains all the veto power.”
“How does that happen, Wally? How do girls know how to do that now? When I was her age, I thought I had to do whatever Al thought was right.”
“Mom, Lorraine has been out making her own way for a long time. She has a mind of her own, and she doesn’t even stop to think that she shouldn’t have. That’s just what she’s used to. I’m just kidding about her being bossy. She’s not like that. But I don’t tell her what to do. We talk everything over.”
“And do you like that?”
“Of course I do. I don’t want to be her boss; I want to be her partner.”
“Do you think most men your age feel that way?”
“I don’t know. Not most, maybe. But a lot do—especially all the ones who’ve married someone like Lorraine.” He laughed. “They don’t have much choice.”
Mom smiled. “I like the way Lorraine does it,” she said. “She’s so soft-spoken, and she loves you so much I can see it every time she looks at you. But she’s Lorraine, at the same time, and not just ‘Wally’s wife.’”
“Well . . . I will admit she loves me. But I can’t say I blame her.” He grinned.
“Don’t sit here and brag about that, young man. You get busy and produce a grandchild for me.”
“Okay. Should I run home right now?”
But now Wally had gone one step too far. Mom was blushing. And Wally thought maybe he was too. “You’d better get back to work,” she said, “or I’ll fire you for goofing around.”
Wally l
aughed, and he headed back to his own office, but it was an interesting little joke his mom had made. In some ways, she did like to think that she was in charge. And Wally rather liked to think he was the boss. He hoped that wouldn’t lead to problems somewhere down the line.
Later that day, Dad came by. Wally hadn’t seen him for a few days. The dealership was getting busier now, with more new cars coming in all the time. New Hudsons and Nashes had been introduced at the first of the year, but few had actually reached Utah until lately. Now, in May, more were arriving, and buyers were waiting. Dad had been putting in some long hours. He walked briskly into Wally’s office, looking like he was in a hurry, and said, “Wally, I had another man ask me today if you’d be willing to talk to his club. The Rotarians, I think it was.”
Wally had gotten used to that. A lot of people seemed to be interested in hearing about his experiences in prison camp. Wally didn’t mind; in fact, he was getting pretty good at it, but he sometimes felt as though people wanted to hear what devils all Japanese were. When Wally talked about all people being essentially the same, as he liked to do, he seemed to get a good response, but as soon as he allowed questions, people wanted to hear about the torture, about the inhuman treatment the POWs had received, and there was plenty of that to report. It just wasn’t what Wally wanted to emphasize. Still, Wally said, “Sure, Dad. I can do that. Just have him give me a call.”
“Well, actually, I already did. I gave him your number. I just wanted you to know he’d be getting in touch with you.” He stepped toward the door, as though he were about to leave.
He was holding his hat in his hand.
“Okay, Dad,” Wally said. “I’ll do my round of talks, and then Alex can come home and take over. He’ll do a better job anyway. He always was a better speaker than me.”
“Well, he’s always been relaxed in front of a group. Not many of us feel that way.”
Wally nodded, but he was a little surprised at the response. He had half expected a compliment for his own skills. What he couldn’t resist asking was, “What do you think Alex will do when he gets back?”