by Unknown
Just as they arrived, a beefy man in uniform lumbered down the steps of the bus with a clipboard under one arm. No one had even known he was there; all they had seen was the driver, who sat staring ahead expressionlessly with the motor loudly idling.
“All right, men,” the man in uniform called. “Line up here to my left.”
People began milling in his direction, the relatives as well as the recruits. Michael, however, stayed where he was. He gazed northward, straight up Broadway to where it crossed Eastern Avenue.
“Move along, men. Say your goodbyes.”
Mr. Kowalski raised his Kodak and snapped a picture of Jerry grinning stiffly and unnaturally. Jerry’s little sister blew on a painted tin horn. His girlfriend threw her arms around him and buried her face in his neck.
“Let’s get going, men, double-time.”
But it was from the east, from St. Cassian Street, that Pauline came running. She had her red coat on, which was how they could all spot her from such a distance. They said, “Michael! Look!” and Michael turned at once in the right direction, although Pauline herself had not called out. When she came nearer they could see why. She had no breath left, poor thing. She was gasping and tousle-haired and flushed—really not at her prettiest, but who in the world cared? She was holding out her arms, and Michael dropped his belongings and started running too, and when they collided he swooped her up so her feet completely left the ground. Everybody said “Ah” in one long, satisfied sigh—everybody except his mother, but even she watched with something close to sympathy. How could she not? They were hugging as if they would never let go, and Pauline was speaking in broken gasps: “. . . thought you were leaving by train, but . . . went to your house . . . went to Wanda’s . . . finally asked a man on the street and . . . Michael, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“All aboard!” the man in uniform bellowed.
Michael and Pauline tore apart. He turned and went back for his belongings. He ducked his head to let his mother kiss him. He sent one last look toward Pauline and then he climbed onto the bus.
When it pulled out, Pauline and Mrs. Anton were standing side by side, both waving with all their hearts.
Now carved wooden creches and plaster Santas and ten-inch-tall, cone-shaped green straw Christmas trees blobbed with soap-flake snow stood among the flags in the parlor windows. Mrs. Szapp’s famous angels—a dozen of them, handblown glass—fought for space beneath the palm fronds. Mrs. Brunek marched eight china reindeer straight across her map of Czechoslovakia.
Almost none of the boys who’d enlisted returned for the holidays. They had left too recently; they were confined to their various posts. In theory, this was something that their families had been prepared for, but still it came as a shock. The streets all at once seemed so quiet. Their sons’ bedrooms seemed so empty. The dinner tables were too sedate and orderly—no long-armed, greedy boys pouncing on the last chicken wing or gulping down milk by the quart.
Instead, there were mere letters, all of which might have been written by the same person. “Got a ‘grand’ bunch of guys in my unit” and “You wouldn’t believe the tons of gear we have to lug” and “Sure do miss those Sunday evenings with you folks around the radio.” These identical lines, with only minor differences, were read aloud in the grocery store by Mrs. Witt, Mrs. Serge, Mrs. Kowalski, Mrs. Dobek . . . and yet their sons were not alike in any way, or at least had not seemed so till now. “Could take my weapon apart blindfolded and put it together again,” Michael Anton wrote—Michael! so peaceful, so unmechanical!—as did Joey Serge and Davey Witt. It wasn’t just their similar experiences (the KP duty, tetanus shots, blistered feet) but the way they worded things—the slangy, loping language, with too many sets of quotation marks and not enough commas. “Took a 20 mi. hike yesterday and I can tell you my ‘dogs’ are the worse for it . . . Wish you could see how neat I make my bed mom now that I’ve got a ‘sarge’ standing over me watching.”
Maybe the letters they wrote their girlfriends were more distinctive. Or maybe not; who knew? There were only so many ways to say “I love you” and “I miss you.” But their girlfriends kept their letters to themselves, disclosing only a sentence or two and then just to the other girls. So the older women had to speculate about that.
Michael wrote Pauline every day, Katie and Wanda reported. Sometimes he wrote twice a day. But none of the lines they quoted revealed anything interesting. He didn’t like the food. The guy in the bunk next to him had a constant, honking cough. Life in camp alternated between working your head off one moment and sitting around, sitting around, sitting around the next, just waiting for the war to be over. By now it was a whole new year, 1942, and you would have thought they could have wrapped things up weeks ago.
Every so often, in the late afternoon, the three girls would stop by Anton’s Grocery—Katie and Wanda and Pauline, sometimes with Pauline’s friend Anna tagging along. “How are you bearing up, Mrs. Anton?” Pauline would say. “Michael asked me to check on you. He’s worried how you’re doing. Have you heard from him lately?”
Mrs. Anton was her usual gray self (“If he’s as worried as all that, he never should have gone and enlisted,” she said once), but those who knew her well could detect the gratified pleats at the corners of her mouth. And she always said, “You’ve heard, I guess,” which was her devious way of asking without asking.
“Yes, a letter came this morning. He’s managing okay, he says.”
After the girls had left, the women would tell Mrs. Anton how sweet it was of Pauline to stop by. “She’s trying to be nice,” they told her. “You have to hand her that much.”
Mrs. Anton just said, “Hmpf. For somebody holding down a job, she certainly has a lot of spare time, is all I can say.”
Mrs. Anton had hired a colored man to help out in Michael’s stead. Eustace, his name was. He was small and dry and toasty brown, of an indeterminate age, and he always wore a suitcoat over his bib overalls. Any time Mrs. Anton assigned him a chore, he said, “Yes-sum,” and touched the brim of his hat in a dignified and respectful manner, but she told the other women she couldn’t wait to be rid of him. “This is a family business,” she said. “I can’t afford to hire some stranger off the streets! I just want Michael home again. I don’t understand what’s keeping him.”
In February he did come home, but only briefly. By this time people were growing accustomed to the sight of uniforms in their neighborhood, their sons returning for visits in glaringly short haircuts and government-issue woolens. But Michael seemed more changed than the other boys. His face was positively gaunt, with hollows below the cheekbones and shadows the color of bruises underneath his eyes. He was less attentive to his mother, almost not in evidence around the store, and absentminded when friends addressed him on the street. Every fiber of his being, it seemed, was focused on Pauline.
Well, that was something else people were growing accustomed to: these intense wartime romances. Three of the Szapp boys had married within a single week! But since Pauline was from away, this meant Michael all but disappeared from view. He spent most of his time at her family’s house. Her family loved him, Wanda reported. They were very doting and welcoming—a household of daughters, four of them, only one as yet married. They cooked for him and made a big fuss whenever he showed up. And Pauline, of course, was in heaven. It was a perfect, blissful five days, by all accounts, and then he shipped out for special training in California. (Was it his gift for reassembling rifles? Some fund of superior intelligence up till now kept hidden?) Mrs. Anton was left looking more bereft than ever. She no longer discussed her plans to fire Eustace.
Mrs. Szapp asked Mrs. Anton if Michael and Pauline were thinking of marriage. This was not very tactful of her. The other customers tensed. But Mrs. Anton surprised them. Yes, she said mildly, he’d said something about it. He said the subject had come up between them. And it was a fact that a Baltimore girl would be preferable to somebody French or English.
O
h, well, of course. Sure couldn’t argue with that, people said, tumbling over each other’s words in their haste to reassure her.
But you never knew, Mrs. Anton went on. There was many a slip betwixt cup and lip. She wasn’t holding her breath.
She brightened as she said this—unbecomingly, some agreed later, discussing it among themselves.
Katie Vilna left the cannery and took a job making airplane parts. The Golka twins journeyed daily to the steel mill out at Sparrows Point. And Wanda Bryk might join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, as soon as they began accepting applications. Should she? Shouldn’t she? she asked, twirling on her stool at the soda fountain. Yes! the other girls told her. Do it! They would join in a flash, if only their parents would let them.
Pauline didn’t come around St. Cassian Street much anymore. She was busy with her volunteer work. The neighborhood girls had their own volunteer work (they must have rolled a million bandages by now, all the while wearing white headdresses that made them look like sphinxes), but Pauline’s sounded more interesting. She was helping out at a Red Cross canteen, Katie said, serving coffee and doughnuts to lonesome soldiers passing through the port. Sometimes Katie helped too. Katie couldn’t count all the fellows she’d met! She said her biggest expense these days was stationery.
A number of the girls asked if they could come with her next time.
In Anton’s Grocery, Mrs. Szapp said, “Where has Pauline got to? Nobody seems to have seen her.”
“Oh, she’s around,” Mrs. Anton said.
“I thought she might have gone off somewhere.”
“She’s around, I tell you! She was in here just . . . when was it. Just last week, or the week before. Talking on and on about Michael. You know how she talks.”
Mrs. Szapp was quiet a moment, and then she asked how many ration points a pound of sausage would cost her.
The younger of the Piazy boys went down with his ship in the Coral Sea. It was the parish’s first casualty. Mr. Piazy completely stopped speaking. The neighbors walked around for days with pale, tight faces, silently shaking their heads, murmuring phrases of disbelief when they met on the street. So this was for real! they seemed to be saying to each other. Wait a minute! No one had told them things would get so serious!
The Dobeks received a telegram saying Joe was missing in action. Davey Witt was sent home with some kind of nervous trouble that the Witts preferred not to discuss. Jerry Kowalski caught malaria. And Michael Anton was shot in the back and sidelined to the infirmary.
Mrs. Anton said she was glad. She said, “Every day he spends lying in that hospital bed is a day he’s not overseas getting killed.” Nobody could blame her.
Pauline got more letters than ever, now, and already she had three shoeboxes full. She kept referring to Michael’s having been “wounded.” And of course, he had been wounded, but only by mistake. Some stupid, careless mistake on the part of a fellow trainee. To hear Pauline talk, though, you would think he’d been in hand-to-hand combat.
The elderly Japanese man who cleaned fish in the Broadway Market had quietly disappeared. Where had he gone? He’d been perfectly nice! Oh, things were dragging on too long, here. This war was lasting forever; everything was taking more time than anyone had expected. Already it was summer. Pearl Harbor seemed to have happened about a hundred years ago.
The oddest items were in short supply. Hairpins, for instance. Who would have thought hairpins? Gasoline, all right, but . . . And the littlest of the Brunek boys couldn’t have the tricycle he’d requested for his birthday. Rubber tires were the reason. But try explaining that to Petey Brunek!
Then the War Office sent the Szapps two telegrams in the space of three days, and everybody felt guilty for complaining about trivia.
Although still, it would have been nice if Petey could have had his tricycle.
When Michael Anton came home to stay, he wrote ahead to his mother and said he would like for Pauline to meet his train alone. Mrs. Anton didn’t appear to take offense. She supposed he planned to pop the question, she told the other women, and she spoke calmly, with a light shrug. As well she could afford to, now that she had her son back.
The reason for his discharge was a pronounced and permanent limp. All his mother had dared hope was that he’d be transferred to a desk job, but mysteriously, unexplainably, he was sent home instead. He would never, ever in his life have to partake in combat. Mrs. Anton said soldiers called that a “million-dollar wound.” Then she stammered and glanced toward Mrs. Szapp, but Mrs. Szapp said, kindly, “Ten million dollars, I would term it. God’s been good to you, Dolly.”
At around the time Michael and Pauline were expected to alight from the streetcar—toward noon on a Wednesday at the very tail end of August—women started showing up at the grocery store to make single, random purchases. One box of Jell-O. A flyswatter. They lingered a long while, chitchatting, casting sidelong glances at Mrs. Anton who wore a nicer-than-usual dress and a dab of lipstick. Eventually, having no further excuse to stay, they moved out onto the sidewalk and stood around in front of Mrs. Serge’s parlor window next door. Mrs. Serge had a row of china nuns lined up beneath her service banner—little cute nuns, singing O-mouthed over hymn books or kneeling in prayer with tiny gold dots of rosaries painted across their fronts. It was hot as blazes, the sun glistening on the women’s faces and spreading darkened half-moons beneath their arms, but still they went on studying Mrs. Serge’s nuns.
Might have known the train would be late, they murmured to each other. Trains nowadays were always late, always crowded with soldiers and subject to unexplained stops.
Twice Mrs. Anton joined them, on the pretext of seeing a customer to the door—not something she would ordinarily do. She looked toward Dubrowski Street and then ducked back inside. She was wearing actual stockings, the women realized.
The third time she came out, she called, “Eustace? Is Eustace with you all?” although she had no possible grounds for imagining that he would be. And then she looked up the street and cried, “There he is!”
Not Eustace, of course, but Michael, with Pauline beside him. From a distance, they were as small and tidily matched as a couple on a wedding cake—Pauline in something pastel, Michael in summer khakis. Oh, couldn’t a uniform stab your heart, and fill you with love and grief and longing! It was true that Michael carried a cane. He leaned on it fairly heavily, tilting as he swung his right leg, and Pauline was lugging his gladstone bag in front of her with both hands. But still they made good time. The women let him come to them. They stood waiting, absorbing the sight of him.
Then he was close enough so they could make out his broad grin, which stretched his face to a diamond shape and reminded them of the rambunctious kid he had been back in grade school. And his mother gave a sound that seemed wrenched from her chest, and set off at a hobbling run to meet him.
Long, long afterward, reminiscing together about how oddly exhilarating those hard, sad war years had been, more than one of the women privately summoned the picture of Michael Anton and his mother hugging on the sidewalk while Pauline watched, smiling, tipping slightly backward against the weight of his bag.
He said he was in no pain at all, except for when it rained. Then he might get a twinge in his hip joint. For he had been shot in the hip, not the back. In the rear end, to put it plainly. (“Back” had been a politeness.) Out in the woods on maneuvers, clambering over a log, he had felt a kind of slamming sensation and a deep, flaring ache, and next thing he knew he was lying facedown on a pile of moldering leaves. Lucky he’d been mounting that log or he would have been shot in the back, possibly straight through the heart. And yes, he could say who had done it: that fellow with the constant cough who’d bunked next to him in Virginia. Wouldn’t you just know that of all the men he’d trained with, that was the one they would ship west with him? The guy’s rifle had gone off when he stumbled—an accident, but one that never should have happened in view of the safety measures drilled into them from the start.
Still, look at it this way: that fellow was a whole lot worse off now than Michael. He was still in the Army.
It was Thursday afternoon, and Michael, wearing gray work trousers and a blue plaid cotton shirt washed nearly translucent, was shelving pinto beans as he spoke. Mrs. Brunek, Miss Jakubek, and Mrs. Serge stood at the counter, each ostentatiously displaying a grocery list, but they weren’t fooling a soul. People had been coming in all day on the flimsiest of excuses, just wanting to wish Michael well and hear what he had to say for himself.
He said it would take him a while to catch on to this ration-point business. So complicated! So many forms! And there were other things to get used to. The skylight in Penn Station, he said, had been painted over completely, that pretty compass-rose sort of glass made opaque in case of air raids. Did they know that? No, they did not. They didn’t have much reason to ride the train these days.
And it was such a surprise, he went on, to see the blackout shades in everybody’s windows. Why, things were no different here than out west! Evidently he had expected that home would be exempt somehow—that the war was only elsewhere.
Well, just look at Davey Witt. Davey refused to sleep in a room alone now. Lord only knew what those poor boys had been through, so far away from Baltimore.
Mrs. Anton punched the keys of the sculptured brass cash register and the drawer slid open with its musical chin-chink! She was wearing her normal clothes again, but her manner was livelier than the three women had seen in ages, and when she told them “Come back soon!” she was very nearly singing.
Halfway out the door, the women caught sight of Pauline. She was flying toward them in a drift of pink-flowered white muslin, holding onto her straw hat so it wouldn’t blow away in the breeze she’d set up. Interesting how she’d changed her colors just at the very time when she was changing in people’s opinions. From dangerous and dramatic red to gentle, soft pastels, she’d gone. Probably that was due to the season, but still, they did like her so much! She was just what Michael needed, someone to warm up his life. Notice how she greeted all the women by name. “Hello, Mrs. Brunek! Hi, Miss Jakubek! Hi, Mrs. Serge!” And how at home she seemed, darting past them into the grocery store, trilling her fingers at Michael’s mother and tossing Michael a dimpled smile that turned him sweetly self-conscious. For of course the women followed her back inside. It would be a shame to miss this!