Summer of My German Soldier

  Finally Mr. Kishner replaced his fountain pen in his onyx desk set and rose, looking me over closely for the first time, and I knew that he would speak. “Young lady, you have embarrassed Jews everywhere. Because your loyalty is questionable, then every Jew’s loyalty is in question.” He sighed before adding, “I just wanted you to know.”

  Outside Shanley’s Restaurant the air came up sharp and clean. “Cold enough for you?” asked Mr. Grimes.

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” I said. A vision of snow on distant mountaintops came to me and I was close to asking if there were mountains at Bolton, but fear that he would say there was only flat land kept the question unasked. With the end of Anton, hope had taken to its sickbed, if not its deathbed.

  I found a small bit of courage within, not enough for mountains, but maybe for a little snow. I decided to squander it. “Any chance we might get snow for Christmas?”

  Mr. Grimes looked to the right and then the left, shifted into second, and entered the two-lane highway before speaking. “Weatherman on the radio said the Carolinas might get some, but I ain’t never heard of snow taking no geography lessons. Back in ’38 or ’39—’38 it was—we got almost an inch of snow for Christmas.”

  “I’d like that to happen again,” I said as I brought my shoeless feet up beside me on the car seat. My head found a resting place in the bough of my arm. I felt myself going down, down to sleep.

  Against my arm, tapping. “Wake up, girl. We’re almost there.”

  “Wha—” I shifted my yawn inside the crook of my elbow.

  “We’re coming into Bolton, thought you’d like to see it. The school’s east of town.”

  “Oh,” I said, conscious of feeling nothing but sleepy.

  Then, spanning the width of the street, strings of Christmas lights—red and blue, green and yellow. A lighted movie marquee announced, THE FIVE SULLIVANS AND XMAS CARTOONS.

  “I saw that movie!” I said, coming alive. “All about five brothers, sailors on this ship that was sunk. Saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Try to see that movie if you get the chance.”

  “Nope,” answered Mr. Grimes. “Don’t have to spend my money for sadness. Plenty of that to be had for free.”

  Mr. Grimes followed the road through town, past two blocks of houses, a gas station, and then open land. Headlights picked up a black iron fence, and as the car swung through open gates I saw a sign with the Arkansas state seal. It read:

  THE JASPER E. CONRAD

  ARKANSAS REFORMATORY FOR GIRLS

  BOLTON, ARKANSAS

  The lights were on in the three-story building. In the darkness it looked no different from any other three-story brick. No! There was something different. The windows were covered, all covered, with diamond-shaped, heavy wire screening. At the Memphis Zoo they use the same kind of screening for the animals.

  20. My only hope

  MY EYES OPENED. I measured the bleakness of the morning against the painted grayness of the walls and estimated the time to be six thirty. Ever since I had been here, and today marked the thirty-second morning, there had been this new ability of mine to awaken, fully awake, without stretching or yawning. Part of it was knowing that this thirty minutes before the wake-up bell was the only time that belonged to me.

  All right, get to it, I told myself. This is finally going to be the morning when things come to me: My plans for a lifetime. I gave myself the usual instructions: Try new roads; check out all byways, explore every possibility. But my mind hadn’t even finished its pep talk when the familiar vision intruded. “Go away,” I said out loud, “I have to be practical.” I couldn’t risk everything on such a slim hope. It didn’t make sense!

  Think practical; think about living in Memphis with Grandmother and Grandfather. My father wouldn’t hear of it. Didn’t he tell the FBI that they had no right to take me to Grandma’s that evening after they had finished questioning me?

  Then think about going away to school, to some private place in New England where nobody would know me. My mother wouldn’t let me. Even before the scandal I clipped an ad from the back pages of The Ladies’ Home Journal showing a girl about my age smiling at her horse, and underneath the picture it read, “Briar Cliff: an experience in living.”

  My mother only glanced at the ad before starting to laugh, “Where do you dream up such ideas?” she demanded. “Are you such a fancy girl you need such a fancy school?” No possibility there, none at all.

  Well, I’ve heard about people working their way through school, and there are things I can do. I could take care of the horses. I’d love that, but even if that job were filled there are other things. Cooks need helpers, or maybe I could use the work experience that I’m getting here. As I brought my hands from beneath the blanket bleach attacked my nostrils. That smell may have been part of my imagination, but my red, chapped hands weren’t. No, I don’t want to work in anybody’s laundry anywhere, anymore.

  The vision was still there waiting for me, soft and appealing. I let it in. It’s six years from now. I’m eighteen. The war is over. With my thousand-dollar war bond, I have money enough to take a train to New York and from there a ship to Germany. Another train ride and I’m in Göttingen. At the train station I change into my prettiest dress before dialing the number. No, not at the station, better at a hotel.

  A woman answers and I ask, “Mrs. Reiker?”

  “This is Mrs. Reiker,” says the voice in elegant English.

  “Mrs. Reiker,” I say slowly, “I’m an American. My name is Patricia Bergen. I knew your son, Anton.” There is only silence, so I stumble on. “We were friends back when he was a prisoner of war, in America.”

  “You knew Anton?” she asks, her voice hollow like it was traveling over great distance, or great sorrow.

  I breathe in deeply before answering. “Yes, I knew Anton. We were friends. I tried to help him.”

  “You tried to help him? Where are you?” asks Mrs. Reiker, sounding suddenly energized.

  I tell her that I’m right here in Göttingen and she asks, “Could you possibly have dinner with us tonight? And of course any traveling companions you have would be most welcome.”

  “Well, I don’t actually have any traveling companions,” I say.

  “Then you must stay with us,” she replies. “We have a large house. We could make you most comfortable.”

  My heart floated up like a helium balloon until the ringing of the wake-up bell punctured it. I cried out against the intrusion, wondering if there weren’t some way to hold onto the vision. It seemed unfair. I had lost my chance to become a member of the family.

  “Hey, Natz, you gonna get up? Scrambled egg day.”

  I pulled the covers down to look directly into the Raggedy Ann eyes of my roommate, Mavis McCall. “I’m getting up,” I said, wiggling my feet to give the impression of forward movement. “Could you please stop calling me Natz?”

  “Geez, whatta ya want me to call ya, Nazi or Spy like them others do?” Mavis managed to look as though I had just spit upon her grandmother’s grave.

  “Well, if it’s all the same to you, you could call me Patty or even the name I was born with, Patricia.” Mavis looked a long way from being convinced so I added, “I don’t call you Thief, do I?”

  In the cafeteria line Mavis stood in front of me as rigidly silent as the angel on the topmost point of the room’s Christmas tree. “Don’t they know that Christmas trees are supposed to be taken down as soon as Christmas is over?” I asked.

  “Can’t go ’bout taking a Christmas tree down on a Sunday!” she said, sounding shocked at my ignorance. “Wouldn’t be right.”

  I was grateful that she was still talking to me. “No, guess not,” I answered.

  As Mavis wiped the last crumbs from her plate with a piece of white bread, I saw her eyes check my plate. “I haven’t touched my eggs,” I said, pushing my plate towards her and wondering why the eggs didn’t taste as powdery to her as they did to me.

  Mavis scraped them onto her plate, t
hen paused with her fork directly over my mound of grits. Her eyes sought my permission. “I’m all finished eating,” I said.

  “You ain’t much of an eater, is you?” she said and then added in lieu of thanks, “Patty.”

  After breakfast the day room, with its hard-backed chairs lined like soldiers against the wall, was empty. The girls had all gone over to the nondenominational services in the chapel. On my first Sunday here I had gone because the head matron, Miss Laud (secretly called “Miss Bald” due to the fact that pink skin was beginning to show through her hair) kept emphasizing that the services were absolutely nondenominational. Now maybe, and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, the services are nondenominational for Baptists, Methodists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they are definitely not nondenominational for a Jewish girl. I say this because the minister spent just about his whole sermon talking about the method the Jews used when they killed Jesus.

  The clock high above the doorway of the day room read ten till ten, yet the grayness of the morning hung on. On the side table sat the room’s most valuable item, a mahogany radio with an arched top. Usually it was ablare with sad-sounding cowboys singing of girls they had loved and lost, but for the time being it sat quietly neglected.

  I snapped the knob to the right and waited for the tubes to warm. I tried to find something good to listen to on a Sunday morning. Phil Baker and his Sixty-four Dollar Question wasn’t till evening and so was Baby Snooks. Even Andre Kostelanetz and his orchestra wasn’t till later.

  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that—”

  I moved the dial. This time to singing. “Where he leads me, I shall follow—”

  And another turn of the dial. “Tell me why it is, dear friends,” cried out a man’s voice in apparent anguish, “that people will believe the promise of a bank. Give us your money, we’ll keep it safe. And they’ll believe the promise of a boss. Work for me, and I’ll give you money. Then why is it that these same people have trouble believing in the greatest promise ever given to mankind? Jesus made that promise to you, and he made it to me. And this was his promise: Whosoever believeth in me shall be given life everlasting.”

  I snapped the knob to the left, and, except for the steady hissing of the radiator, the room was silent.

  Back in my room the thick Sunday edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a gift subscription from Charlene Madlee, lay on my bed. It was nice having a lady like that for a friend. And I liked having my very own newspaper subscription. I mean besides reading it, it was nice in another way too. It was the something good (instead of always the something bad) that set me apart. I wasn’t like them, like the others, and the paper was proof of that.

  After my trial Charlene Madlee was the only reporter (and the courtroom was filled with them) who came over to say she was sorry. And she was too! I caught a look on her face of genuine distress. On my second day at Bolton I received her first note. I read it so many times that it became engraved on my brain.

  Patty,

  I’m sending you a subscription to my paper

  with the hope that you will enjoy reading it.

  Keep smiling!

  Charlene Madlee

  And in each reading of Charlene’s note I scoured her words for the gift of friendship. Sometimes, like an optical illusion, I found it, and other times I didn’t.

  Anyway I wrote Charlene back, thanking her and saying the thing I liked most to read were the stories that carried her by-line. That wasn’t hard to say. People like honest compliments, I know that. It was what I said next that made me hesitate because it sounded presumptuous. “I still think I’d like to study to become some kind of reporter or writer someday.” But she didn’t think I was just a presumptuous kid, because she wrote me right back, a whole page.

  Footsteps. Determined footsteps came echoing down the corridor. Miss Laud? What would she want me for? I’m not breaking any rules: no cigarettes, no shoes on the bed, door open. About the nondenominational services? But I’ve already explained that, how the services go against my beliefs. I won’t go!

  As the footsteps stopped at my door, fear took hold. I forced myself to look up at the full standing authority of Miss Evelyn Laud.

  “You know a Nigra named Ruth Hughes?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “A Nigra named Ruth Hughes, says she’s your nanny, that right?”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am, that’s right.”

  Miss Laud nodded.

  “Well, go on down to the visitors’ room and see her.”

  “Ma’am?” I asked, like one who has suddenly stopped understanding the English language.

  “Well, go down and see her,” repeated Miss Laud in tones loud enough for the deaf.

  Through the open archway of the visitors’ room I could see Ruth, her back towards me, looking out the mesh-covered window to the courtyard below. She was wearing a dress I had never seen before, deep blue like the sky gets toward evening. It looked to be crepe and good enough not only for Sunday but for Easter Sunday as well. Strange, she didn’t seem to hear my approach for her gaze never strayed from the window.

  “Ruth?”

  Like a spring suddenly released, she turned, her brown face showing a wide, welcoming smile. But it wasn’t the smile that caught me quite as much as her eyes. They had this shine, a gloss that I remembered seeing once before, but I couldn’t quite remember when.

  Arms circled me, bringing me close. “Patty, Honey Babe, how you doing?” A fragrance of bath powder scented gardenia. “You doin’ all right, Honey?” My head found its resting place next to her shoulder and I closed my eyes while I silently prayed for the world to go away. “Are they treating you all right here?”

  I nodded my head Yes, but I didn’t know for sure whether she got my message, so I said, “I guess they are. Yes.” And there in the protection of her circle, I felt freshly born.

  Ruth, still with an arm around my waist, led me to a wooden bench next to the radiator, but before we sat down she pushed me an arm’s length away and gave me a careful looking over. “You shore ain’t doin’ no overeating hereabouts, are you?”

  “On Sundays we have scrambled eggs for breakfast,” I said, wondering if my answer fit the question.

  “There’s six other days need accounting for.”

  “Well, mostly they serve grits for breakfast.”

  Ruth looked angry. “You never would eat no grits.”

  “I eat them sometimes,” I said, feeling that we should somehow be spending this time together on better things. “Tell me something. What’s new in Jenkinsville?”

  “Same old town it’s always been, Honey. When the Bible says that there ain’t nothing new under the sun, I think they musta had Jenkinsville in mind,” Ruth laughed, enjoying her own joke. When her face resettled she added, “Tell you this, I got myself a new job, keeps house for the colored schoolteacher, Miz Cora Mae Ford. You knows her?”

  I said that I did while the feeling of betrayal swept over me.

  Ruth went on. “She and her husband, Robert, he’s got himself a good job too, drives one of them trucks for Dixie Transport. Well, they got themselves three of the cutest children. Now the baby, Michael Augustus, ain’t even walking yet and I declare if he ain’t ’bout the sweetest little thing I ever did see.”

  I told myself to forget it. Ruth didn’t just up and desert me, remember that. She was fired. Fired! She has to make a living, get along as best as she can. And if she didn’t care for me, would she have made this long trip just to see me?

  “How did you ever manage to get here, Ruth?”

  Her eyes grew wide and the gloss disappeared. It must have had something to do with how the light from the window struck her eyes. “Would you ever think that your old Ruth would come a-visiting in a big vehicle driven by a chauffeur?”

  “Really? You’re kidding me?”

  She put a look of mock disgust on her face. “Well, if’n a Greyhound Bus ain’t a big vehicle and if’n
a uniformed driver ain’t a chauffeur then I don’t know much of nothing no more.”

  I felt the muscles about my mouth tugging upward into an unnatural or, at least, seldom-used position. “I’m really glad you came to see me. Must have been a long trip.”

  “No-o-o-o.” said Ruth. “Wasn’t too long ’cause I got to see me places I ain’t never seed before. Heard about, but never seed. Places like Wynne City, Jonesboro, Bolton, places like that.” She suddenly jumped up and rushed across the room to a red-and-white-striped shopping bag.

  Reaching low into the bag, she brought out a box whose lettering was clearly readable through the white tissue paper wrappings. “Ginger snaps. Thanks. You know they’re my very favorites.” I gave Ruth a quick hug. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you this year, but I didn’t get to do any Christmas shopping.”

  “Now that don’t make no nevermind, Patty Babe, ’cause come next Christmas I’m gonna give you a list more’n six feet long. But right now I got you a little somethin’ else.” She reached into her shopping bag to bring out a yellow shoe box tied with red paper ribbon. I broke the string to find a whole family of fried chicken breasts, each one sitting on its very own pink paper napkin.

  “Nothing there but the breasts,” she said. “See, Ruth remembers.”

  And I saw too that Ruth had remembered her own rule about the proper frying of chicken. “Secret is,” she used to say, “to fry it, and fry it done in corn meal.” And while the chicken fried, there was something else she always did. She’d break an egg or two into a bowl of corn meal, throw in a chopped-up onion, and then she’d drop spoonfuls of the batter into the pan next to the chicken. Hush puppies. I don’t think I ever in my life had fried chicken without them.

  I pinched off a crispy piece of skin and placed it on my tongue. “Haven’t had anything this good since I’ve been here.”

  “Miz Bergen, she been up visiting you?”