The Wartime Sisters

by Lynda Cohen Loigman

  Lillian was accustomed to planning large events. As a military wife, she was used to extended timelines, to organizational delays, to the never-ending process of obtaining government approvals. But live radio, she learned, was a last-minute business. Though she’d been frustrated and skeptical waiting for news, when it finally came, she felt a burst of adrenaline. The limited amount of time in which to get everything done only sharpened her focus.

  Lillian needed access to the telephone and a place to organize her papers, so she began doing her work at Patrick’s desk. He balked slightly at first when she moved some of his files, but soon enough, he was referring to the room as “our” office. Inside, Lillian was comforted by the solidity of the shelves and the spicy scent of Patrick’s pipe that lingered in the air. Most of all, she loved the silence that billowed peacefully around her when the door was shut tight and she was alone. She felt safe in that space, content and peaceful.

  It was a far cry from what she had felt in her father’s old office, the one time she had entered without his permission.

  * * *

  When Lillian was seven years old, she borrowed a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from her library. World War I had just begun, and even the librarians were on edge, recommending fantasy and romance to anyone who walked through the doors.

  Those days, Lillian’s prime occupation was finding the perfect spot in which to read her books. But the day after she checked out The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, noise and distraction seemed to follow her everywhere. Unfortunately, her bedroom was next to the kitchen, where her mother was humming loudly through dinner preparations. Lillian sat on the sofa in the living room for a while, but the lighting was dim, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t block out the ticking of the grandfather clock. She moved to the tiny backyard next, but by the late afternoon, the warblers showed up, and she was forced to go inside to escape their constant chirping.

  As the afternoon wore on, Lillian couldn’t stop thinking about how empty and quiet her father’s office was. It was only an extra bedroom that her father had claimed, but it was far from the kitchen, far from the birds, and if she shut the door all the way, she wouldn’t hear the grandfather clock. She had over an hour until he got home from work.

  Lillian creaked open the door and tiptoed inside. The room was off limits, but what would be the harm? She made herself comfortable in the cracked leather chair and basked in the silent space behind the desk. Before long, she was immersed in the pages of her story, so engrossed that she didn’t hear her father come in.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  She slammed the book shut, jumped down off the chair, and stood in front of him with her knees shaking. “I didn’t touch anything. It’s so quiet in here, and I wanted to read.”

  “You wanted to read?”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  He took a step closer and grabbed the book from her hands. She was about to protest but she held her tongue.

  “What have we here?” he asked, tapping the cover. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Aren’t you a little young for this book?”

  For a moment, she believed he was excited about her selection. For a moment, she mistook his sarcasm for pride.

  “Some of the words are hard for me, but when I don’t know what they mean, I look them up in the dictionary.”

  “In that dictionary over there?” He nodded in the direction of the bookshelf under the window.

  “Yes,” she repeated. “I look up the words.”

  She was completely unprepared for the pain that shot through her arm when he grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her toward the bookcase.

  “You told me you didn’t touch anything in this room,” he growled. “But if you used this dictionary, you were lying.” When Lillian looked up at him, his eyes had clouded over. He looked past her, through her, as if she weren’t there.

  “I won’t lie again, Daddy. I promise I won’t!”

  “You’re damn right you won’t.”

  His lips, pale and slimy, formed a callous grin. In one swift motion, he let go of her wrist and pushed her backward into the corner of the desk. He was just about to strike her with the borrowed book when Lillian’s mother ran into the room.

  “Malcolm! Put that down!”

  It was as if her mother had turned off a switch, her voice breaking the spell Lillian’s father was under. He blinked a few times and threw the book on the desk.

  “I’d better not see you in here again,” he said. When he walked out the door, Lillian’s mother asked where he was going.

  “I’m not staying here. I’ll eat at the officers’ club.”

  Lillian never finished reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She returned it to the library the very next morning.

  Millie

  Millie would never forget the first day she entered Building 103—the taste of metal in the air, the ceaseless ringing in her ears, the sense of purpose that ran through her fellow workers like an electric current. But she was never more grateful for her job at the armory than in the days after she received Lenny’s letter. Her fingers flew through the motions until her knuckles grew numb. She lined up the holes; she steadied the springs. Her hands took over so that she didn’t have to think. She hummed softly as she worked, and her worries fell away.

  But when each shift was over, her fears returned. When she shut her eyes at night, she was haunted by Lenny’s image—by the scar on his face and the emptiness behind his eyes. Some nights, sleep came, but it was always interrupted. She would wake in the shadows to increasing darkness: the shock of Lenny’s smirk when he waited for her on Federal Street, the threat behind the words of the letter he had written.

  But even those thoughts were not the most troubling. As bad as they were, there was worse to contend with, visions that roused her with heart-stopping clarity: Lenny trying to take Michael away from her for good, her little boy’s screams as a stranger assailed him.

  * * *

  The only person Millie recognized at her first meeting of the rifle club rifle club was Charlie, one of the guards from the armory’s main gate. He was the same guard Ruth had summoned the day she had confronted Lenny, the one who’d offered Millie his handkerchief and asked if he could help. Ever since that day, whenever Millie passed through the gate, Charlie made a point of greeting her and Michael. He would wave or tip his hat and bend down to shake Michael’s hand. “Good morning, sir,” he would say with mock formality. Michael would repeat the greeting with a solemn look on his face, while Charlie would wink and share a smile with Millie.

  Away from work and out of uniform, Charlie appeared more youthful; he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than she was. She had wondered what his hair was like under his hat—it was darker than she’d supposed and curlier on top. His face seemed rounder, hearty and whole, and when he spotted Millie waving, his mouth widened into a grin.

  “Hello,” she said brightly, happy to see him.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” Charlie answered. Carefully, he handed her an armory-made rifle. It was familiar in her hands, a not uncomfortable feeling.

  “This is only the second time I’ve held one of these,” she confessed.

  “Really? What made you want to join the club?” He was genuinely curious, so sincere in his expression that she almost considered telling him the truth.

  Because my husband is still alive and sending me threatening letters. Because if I don’t give him what he wants, I’m afraid he might come after me or try to take away my son. Because if he shows up again, I want to be prepared.

  “I wanted to learn something new,” she said. Millie turned the rifle over, the way Colonel Walsh had shown her, to get a better look at the trigger housing. “I wonder,” she said, thinking out loud. “What if the trigger on this rifle is one I made myself, one I put together at my table in the shops? There’s no way to tell, but what if it is?”

  The expression on Charlie’s fac
e was a mixture of admiration and curiosity. He didn’t dismiss her question; he didn’t find it strange.

  “Gee.” He whistled softly. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Ruth

  Arthur knew nothing of what had occurred between the sisters—he had no idea that Lenny had risen from the dead or that Millie had moved across the square to live with the Walsh family. Though Ruth had written to him often, the series of revelations and events that had occurred during his absence had been far too complicated for her to put down on paper.

  Once the girls were in bed, Arthur took a hot shower and shaved off his beard. Underneath all the stubble, his round face had turned angular, and beneath his bathrobe, his soft middle was gone. He held himself taller. Like a soldier, Ruth thought.

  Ruth had placed some clean pajamas on the bed for him to wear, but the bottoms were so large that they fell off his waist. Ruth couldn’t help her laughter, but Arthur wasn’t smiling. Naked before her, he took a step closer and pulled her tightly toward him with unfamiliar strength. The shock of his desire, of his mouth over hers, made her forget everything else, including her sister.

  Afterward, she told him all of what had happened, confessing her sins with his arms wrapped around her. “I lied to them both. I pushed for that wedding. I didn’t want Millie to come to Springfield with us.”

  “But Millie agreed. Marrying Lenny was what she wanted. You didn’t force her; it’s not like you held a gun to her head.”

  “If she had come here with us, she might never have married him. She might have met someone else. She might have been spared all that pain.”

  “Maybe, but then Michael would never have been born.” Arthur tightened his embrace and kissed her again. “You can’t change the past, Ruth. You can only move forward.”

  In the next few days, a newfound closeness developed between them. Arthur held Ruth’s attention now in a way he had not before. Certainly, she had thought about him while he was away—pacing the floors and worrying for his safety. But now her thoughts were layered with curiosity and desire. There were sides to her husband that she had never anticipated, a passion that he’d only recently revealed. He reached for her now with a boldness that stunned her. On his second day home, while she was stirring a pot of oatmeal on the stove, he slipped his hands around her waist and pushed aside her hair. The fervor of his kisses on the back of her neck put her in such a stupor that she lost track of her surroundings. The oatmeal burned so badly that she was forced to throw away the pot.

  In the weeks after Arthur’s reappearance, her thoughts were consumed with him. Was this how her sister had first felt about Lenny? Back in Brooklyn, Ruth hadn’t been able to understand the kind of power such attraction could hold over anyone. But now that she’d finally tasted it herself, a new kind of sympathy bubbled up inside her. She wished she could tell Millie that she finally understood what had drawn her to Lenny in the beginning. But she was too embarrassed to admit how little she had known, how limited her view of love had once been.

  * * *

  “Fred and Grace asked us to have dinner with them tomorrow.”

  “Fred and Grace Peabody?” Ruth put down her toothbrush, shut off the faucet, and followed Arthur into the bedroom.

  “Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “You’ve been working with Fred for more than five years, and you’ve never socialized with him before.”

  He kicked off his slippers and slid under the blankets. “You know we have drinks after work sometimes. What can I tell you? He wants to take us out to celebrate my homecoming.”

  “Can’t you get out of it? Tell him we’re busy?”

  “I don’t understand. Why don’t you want to go?”

  “I’m not sure I can stomach an evening with Grace. She’s a terrible gossip, she’s rude, and she’s a snob. And since Millie came to live with us, Grace has only gotten nastier. I’m not sure what exactly she has against Millie, but she’s certainly made no attempt to hide her feelings.” Ruth chose not to mention her nagging suspicion that Grace was involved in Captain O’Brian’s decision to question her sister.

  Arthur leaned over and kissed the back of her shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure that Grace behaves at dinner. Besides, Grace’s feelings about Millie don’t matter. Your sister doesn’t live with us now, remember? The fact is, she isn’t your responsibility anymore.”

  Ruth knew Arthur didn’t mean to be cruel, but she found herself blinking back the tears anyway. “Are they taking us to the Colony Club, at least?” she asked. If she had to spend the evening with Grace and Fred Peabody, she hoped it would be at the private eating club in the old Wesson Mansion. Ruth had walked past the French-style château on Maple Street a dozen times, but only members and their guests were allowed inside.

  “Fred booked us a table at the Hotel Kimball.”

  “That will be nice.” She had a feeling that she and Arthur weren’t Colony Club material; nobody talked about it, but she doubted that the club allowed Jews as guests. Arthur was kissing her neck now, stroking her hair. She put aside her disappointment and turned her attention to her husband.

  * * *

  The next day, Ruth chose the most fashionable dress in her closet—a slim-fitting sheath in smooth black satin. When she went through her jewelry box to choose a pair of earrings, her eyes lingered on the ring that Millie had left behind. The center opal beckoned from inside its diamond nest, and Ruth felt her frustration rise to the surface. Your sister is the one who will need that ring. After she gets married, she’ll have dinners and parties.

  Mama always underestimated me, Ruth thought. She thought Springfield was dull and that my life would be dull too.

  She wondered what her mother would have to say now, if she could see where Ruth lived and how Arthur had changed. In his newly tailored uniform, he was barely recognizable—broad-shouldered and strong, like an officer out of a movie. Ruth lifted the ring from the box and placed it on her right hand. With all of the expensive jewelry Ruth had seen Grace wear—the diamond brooches and the double strands of pearls—even she didn’t have anything that could compare to the ring. It was dazzling, unique—a perfect accessory for a night on the town. Ruth would wear it to dinner, just this once.

  At the hotel, Grace was as glamorous as ever—swishing into the dining room fifteen minutes late with a new fur stole draped over her shoulders. She had refused to let the coat check girl stow it away, preferring to let everyone admire it instead. She gave Ruth a once-over, markedly unimpressed, until she noticed the ring perched on her finger. “What an exquisite piece,” Grace remarked. Ruth held out her hand, as obedient as a child, and waited while Grace examined the opal. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a setting like that. Where did you find it?”

  “It’s been in my family for generations.”

  “That makes sense.” Grace smirked. “It doesn’t look like something you would pick out for yourself.”

  Fred ordered champagne to toast Arthur’s return and later had the waiter bring a full bottle of scotch. Grace gave him a look, but Fred wouldn’t budge. “We’re celebrating,” he insisted, downing his third glass. “This man survived the war. He’s entitled to a drink.”

  “Then why are you the one polishing off the bottle? Last time I checked, you weren’t the one overseas.”

  “We all have our battles to fight,” Fred said bitterly. “Some are just a little bit closer to home than others.” He poured himself another glass, and Arthur tried to change the subject to the new Pentagon building. Grace took out her frustration by guzzling the champagne.

  When the meal was over, Fred insisted on walking back to Armory Square. He wanted some fresh air, he said, and time to stretch his legs. But before long, he wandered far ahead of their group, leaving his wife behind for Ruth and Arthur to contend with. Grace was woozy from the champagne, so Ruth stood on one side of her and Arthur on the other, their arms looped through hers to help pull her along. They were waiting to cross at the corner o
f Chestnut and State Street when Ruth spotted Arietta and her sister walking toward them.

  When she caught Millie’s eye, Ruth felt her face turn pink. She knew how it must look—her arm linked with Grace’s, as if they were friends, chummy ones, even. Ruth’s first thought was to let go of Grace’s arm, but she knew that if she did, Grace might topple to the ground.

  “Hello,” Millie said, approaching the three of them.

  Arthur answered first, without any awkwardness. He was immune, Ruth realized, to the guilt that plagued her. Grace was mercifully silent; her eyes were half closed, and she swayed slightly on her feet. She was much too far gone to recognize anyone.

  “Is she ill?” Millie asked. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s had too much champagne.”

  Arietta crossed her thick arms over her chest. “What a shame,” the cook said. “It must have been quite a celebration.” Hostility hovered around her like steam over a soup pot. This isn’t what it looks like, Ruth wanted to explain. Grace isn’t my friend. We don’t even like each other. But anything she said now would sound contrived.

  “We just saw Casablanca at the Bijou,” Millie said. “You would have liked it, Ruth. It was beautiful, but so sad.” The sorrow in her sister’s voice made Ruth want to linger, but Grace began to mumble, and Arthur said they should get back.

  Ruth was about to ask if Millie wanted to walk home with them, but Arietta spoke first. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee, Mil, and maybe a slice of pie?”

  Millie nodded wordlessly and gave Ruth a small wave goodbye.

  Ruth lifted her left hand to return the gesture, forgetting, for a moment, the ring on her finger. A streetlamp overhead illuminated the opal, and Ruth watched as the jewel drew Millie’s eye.