Tonight, the president had announced that, with the invasion of the Allies into Sicily, the first crack in the Axis had come. Hitler had abandoned the Italians in Sicily just as he had in Tunisia—more than 250,000 Axis troops were captured there. The Russian front was advancing and the Pacific front, too, with its Liberators flying from Midway to continue bombing the Japanese on Wake Island. Louise felt sure Michael had been part of the Sicilian invasion, for he’d been transferred to Tunisia from England. Kitty thought Julian would be involved somehow with the push of the Japanese from the Aleutians to New Guinea. Both women were worried for their men; neither spoke much about it. It was their job to, as the song said, “accentuate the positive.” Little tolerance was given to women who behaved hysterically, to those who wrung their hands and wept over a lack of letters or complained about their lonely Saturday nights, or the way their babies were known to their fathers only by wallet-worn photos.
The president had explained how long military operations took—a little over a year since they planned the North African campaign, six months since they’d planned the one for Sicily. “We cannot just pick up the telephone and order a new campaign to start the next week,” he’d said. Thousands of ships and planes guarded the sea-lanes and carried men and equipment to the point of attack. Here at home were the railroads that carried men to the ports of embarkation, and factories that turned out the necessary materials. (At this, Frank smiled at Kitty, and she smiled back—she was proud.)
Roosevelt made them feel better about rationing: gas for a single bombing mission was equal to 375 A-ration tickets—enough gas to drive one’s car five times across the continent. The initial assault force on Sicily involved 3,000 ships that carried 160,000 men together with 14,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, and 1,800 guns. And this initial force was followed every day by thousands of reinforcements. Kitty thought of one blond-headed young man squeezed onto the deck of a ship, talking to another soldier as they stared out at the water. With so many men, so much equipment, did they feel safer? Or were they nervously awed at the sight of it all, wary of what such vast numbers of weapons portended? You could see different attitudes reflected in the letters the sisters got—cockiness, boredom, loneliness, but never did the men really complain. They made inquiries about the well-being of their loved ones and disregarded their own. They seemed to share a certain pragmatic philosophy: if your number was up, you’d get it; if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t. Tish had read aloud from a letter written by a soldier saying that he’d once gotten the creeps bad, he felt sure he was going to get killed that night. He told her he’d started to shake, even his teeth were chattering. His buddy in the foxhole with him had told him to think of some dame and he’d feel better. So the guy had done it, and he’d stopped shaking, just like that. He said he’d thought of Tish in her blue strapless dress with all the sparkles across the top (Kitty knew the dress; Tish had borrowed it from a friend and brought it home in triumph), and he had thought of how her shoulders were so smooth and white and had smelled so good, and he had stopped shaking. So thanks, kid, he’d written. Thanks for being so beautiful.
The president had praised the great increase in merchant shipping, saying that “tonight we are able to terminate the rationing of coffee.” Frank stood and cheered so loudly the family almost didn’t hear that in a short time more sugar would also be available.
What stuck most with Kitty from FDR’s speech tonight was what he said about the home front: “No one can draw a blue pencil down the middle of the page and call one side the fighting front and the other side the home front. For the two of them are inexorably tied together.” Kitty understood this with her head and her heart and her hands. But what she wished for on this hot summer night was an instant return to normalcy.
It was stifling, still up in the eighties and humid, the air so close it felt like hands around her throat. She sat alone, trying to cool herself with a pleated fan she’d made out of newspaper, her skirt hiked indecently over her knees, her blouse opened two buttons down. The fireflies were out, and they lit on and off, on and off, regular as a heartbeat. She watched them, weary and mesmerized, and each time they lit up there seemed to come another scene of a more innocent summer, scenes from her childhood: Pop churning strawberries into ice cream, his white shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows and his forehead beaded with sweat. Cabbage roses grown so large and fragrant you could smell them a block away. Woozy the cat stuck up in a tree, Kitty’s brothers at the base forlornly calling her. The plunk of the first blueberry into the silver bucket. The thrilling leap of grasshoppers in high grass baked warm and sweet-smelling by the sun. The plunge beneath the surface of the cool green water of the lake on North Avenue Beach. Disembodied voices from people’s darkened front porches, offering greetings as the family walked home from a movie. The Fourth of July, babies asleep on their laid-out blankets while above them fireworks spread across the sky like giant chrysanthemums. Margaret’s canning steaming up the kitchen windows, her apron gaping at the bosom and her hair escaped from her bun in wild, wet tendrils. The scent of outside captured in sheets pulled up to Kitty’s chin by her parents before they kissed her good night. Kids standing out in the yard and calling, “Ohhhhhhhh, Kiiiiitty!” for her to come out and play kick the can. The musical concerts played by bands under ivy-covered gazebos, the goat cart they used to own pulled by the unimaginatively named Nanny. Once Nanny ate a pair of Margaret’s underpants right off the line, and they’d all laughed, even, finally, Margaret. All of the family lying out in the backyard and wishing on stars. And what had she wished for then? A best friend who was not her sister. Free candy. The retirement of Mrs. Hornbuckle, a teacher as mean as her name suggested, before it was Kitty’s turn to have her. All wishes so very different from what she’d wish now.
Kitty looked up and down the block. Nobody out. Everyone in, undoubtedly thinking about what FDR had told them this evening, including the fact that there was no telling when this would all be over. She looked up into the heavens and wished on a star for the safe return of Julian and Michael. And Hank. Then she went inside to write her letters.
Kitty sat at the kitchen table with her sisters and nervously opened the letter from Julian that had finally come that day. She read to herself quickly, biting at her lip.
Say, kid,
I think you goofed up here. I got a letter addressed to me, but you meant it for some guy named Hank. Who’s that? Seems like you know him pretty well, but I don’t remember anybody by that name. This isn’t Henry Small, is it? Doesn’t sound like Henry. You asked him what he was like as a little boy. I remember you asked me that once, too.
I hope you got the job you wanted. I guess life goes on back there, huh? Here, it’s kind of hard to describe, which is why I hardly ever try. But I’ll give it a shot. You know those movies we used to watch where they showed islands? Palm trees blowing in the breeze, the big moon and the gentle waves, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour? These islands aren’t like that. They’re not like that at all. We’ve got coconuts aboveground and rats and ants below. And is it wet! The rain and humidity on these islands is awful—everything molds. We’ve got insects all over the place, and a lot of guys get sick with malaria and other diseases—fungus all over their feet. So far, I’ve escaped that. Hey, did I tell you that some of the guys here started a victory garden? Some guy’s mom sent seeds from home. Who knows how long we’ll be here to tend it, but it gives us something to do.
Sure wish I could fire my bean-shooter at old Schicklgruber himself and turn out his lights. That would move this thing right along. Then I’d come home, put you in my barouche, and you wouldn’t see us for dust—I’d like to drive you all the way to San Francisco, it sure is a nice place.
Keep on writing me. You know what they say, we like our letters real cheerful and real often. Funny to say you feel bored when you’re fighting a war, but when I’m not scared out of my wits, I’m awful bored and the letters do help. Some guys carry them around and reread them so often they fall a
part. One guy got a crayon scribble from his kid he’s never even seen, and when it disintegrated the guy cried—didn’t even care that we all saw. We move around quite a bit, but the mail always finds us eventually. How are your sisters. Maybe you could tell them to write me, too. Some guys get fourteen, fifteen letters a week.
Love,
Julian
“What’d he say?” Louise asked.
Kitty handed her the letter.
Louise read it, then handed it back.
“Well?” Kitty asked.
“Seems like he’s trying hard to write more.”
“Let me see.” Tish took the letter from Kitty, read it quickly, and sat up straighter in her chair. “I’ll write him; I’ll send him ten pages!”
Kitty looked coolly over at her. “Will you.”
“He asked me to!”
No arguing with that. Kitty began her own letter: Dear Julian, I sure was glad to hear from you. She paused, holding her pen up over her paper. Then she changed the period to a comma and added, sweetheart. She stole a look at Tish. Julian was her boyfriend, not Tish’s. Let Tish go ahead and write to him, she couldn’t call him sweetheart.
It seems like years since you left, she wrote. You’re right, things are going along as usual at home. The only unusual thing is that I’m reading a book. Can you believe it?
Kitty read what she’d written, then read it again. What to say about the book? What would he care about the book? In truth, what did she care about the book?
She blew all the air out of her cheeks and began to jiggle her heel. Back again to this awful inability to say something. What was real cheerful? She looked at her sisters, their heads bent over their letters, writing swiftly, smoothly. Sometimes Louise would smile or Tish would giggle, and when that happened, Kitty’s frustration mounted.
Never mind something cheerful. Maybe she needed to try something daring, something that might spur Julian into some kind of action, some kind of admission. Maybe the trouble was that, in her heart of hearts, she didn’t know what her relationship with Julian really was. Oh, she knew she was his girl, but always it came back to her wondering: what did that mean? They’d never been great talkers, not like Louise and Michael, who could sit out on the porch swing and talk for hours. Kitty and Julian weren’t like that. Truth be told, she’d mostly been dazzled by his good looks: the gold flecks in his green eyes, the sweep of his blond hair, his strong, lean body. Once when they went on a picnic out in the country and were lying together on a blanket, Julian had picked up her bare foot and kissed the instep. She’d shivered at the almost indecent intimacy—and longed for more. But what had they ever talked about? What did she really know about Julian, or he about her? Well, here was an opportunity for them to learn something about each other. Somebody had to go first to try to make this relationship more romantic—it was what they both wanted, and men were no good at this kind of thing. Julian’s way of saying he wanted to be intimate with her was to say, “Hey, kid, let’s go swap saliva.” He needed an example set for him.
Her mouth set determinedly, Kitty wrote that she loved Julian like peaches and that she hoped he loved her, too, that she dreamed of the day they’d be married. She knew what their Hotpoint kitchen would look like, with its Mixmaster and electric dishwasher and white ruffled curtains and cheerful decals everywhere. Their bedroom would have matching pale gold quilted satin spreads and blond nightstands with lamps with ruffled shades. She knew just how she’d feel when she heard his key in the lock, how she’d melt a bit inside. She wrote that she wanted to go to sleep with him and wake up with him. Take that, Julian Stanton.
She reread the letter, addressed it, and sealed it shut. She saw Julian in the bathroom, shaving his handsome face; herself in the kitchen, cooking unrationed bacon, her hair tied back with a length of blue satin ribbon.
Next she wrote to Hank, and again asked him, What were you like as a little boy? It would be interesting to know. There was nothing wrong with asking him that; it was something she might ask anyone. Then, as long as she was getting things straightened out, she told him that he must not misinterpret her writing to him, to remember that she was all but engaged, that her relationship with him was only a friendship, and she knew he would have no trouble finding a girlfriend worthy of him, for he was one swell fellow. Really. Exclamation point. There. She couldn’t be any clearer than that about her intentions toward him. She addressed the envelope and sealed it. Then she held it in her hand a long moment before she dropped it into the pile of letters in the center of the table.
Kitty leaned back in her chair and thought of all the mail on all those planes, going to all those places—England, Italy, the myriad islands in the Pacific, the Panama Canal, the Aleutian Islands, New Guinea, Iceland, India…Dangerously, she let herself wonder how many of the letters would be sent back to those who had written them. Despite the mighty efforts to keep up morale, the staggering number of casualties could not be ignored. Replacements were constantly being sent to companies that had lost great numbers of their men—sometimes fifty percent or more. An entire National Guard regiment from a tiny town in Iowa had been wiped out.
Just last week, a church friend of Margaret’s had shared with her the letter her only son had written to be given to his parents in the event of his death. Kitty had overheard Margaret telling Frank about this, her voice shaking. “Imagine, Frank, that young man writing a letter knowing that, if his parents received it, he’d be gone. He told them about his airplane—‘ship,’ they call it—he told them it was beautiful and he was so proud his name was painted on it. He said he wanted them to go on with their lives and be happy, to remember that he was not in any pain and that he had joined the service willingly. Give away his clothes to the relatives, he said, but he wanted his father to have his camera. And he”—here Margaret had begun softly crying—“he thanked them for being good parents, and said he hoped that he was a good son, he had tried to be. Ah, Frank, not even twenty years old.”
Frank had spoken gently. “It’s the cost of war, Margaret. You must not dwell on such things.”
“And I try not to. But I have these dreams, Frank, once I dreamed they were all coming to the house, all the boys who have died. Here they came, up the front steps of the porch—tall and short, dark- and fair-complected, all dirty-faced and, oh, God love them, so weary but grinning, just passing through the house, coming in the front door, going out the back, seemed like thousands and thousands of them. One of them took an apple from the bowl on the table, and then he looked at me with such gratitude. Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t know. We can build the Brooklyn Bridge, but we’re not as intelligent as dogs, whose tails wag automatically in recognition of their species.”
“Sure, dogs fight, too,” Frank had said. “It’s animal nature, and people are animals who dress up in clothes. God gave us free will, and this is what happens. All we can do is—”
“But, Frank, if you’d only seen them in that dream. All so young. And all of them gone now, and with them the promise of all they might have given the world. Who knows what they might have been able—”
“Margaret,” Frank had said. “You just can’t think that way.”
“But I do think that way!” she’d said. And then she’d asked, “Wasn’t there ever a time that you believed there could be lasting peace?”
Frank had been quiet for a long moment. Then he’d said, “There was one time. You remember when we had the blackout in Chicago?”
“August twelfth, 1942,” Margaret had said. “I’ll never forget it. Even the lights at Holy Family, the ones at the altar of the Virgin, were out.”
“Well,” Frank had said, “I looked up into the sky that night and it was just jammed with stars, they were packed in tight all across the horizon, I never knew there were so many! Of course I knew they had always been there, that the lights of the city just prevented us from seeing them, but somehow, on that night, it seemed the stars had come together from distant places, had been called to heave
n’s town square from all over the universe, and they were pushing and shoving and craning their necks to have a look at us foolish mortals, all of us craning our necks to have a look at them. And I took off my silly OCD helmet and I felt the night wind in my hair, and I felt a great humility, Margaret, ’twas a very full feeling. And I felt as well a great sense of promise. For all that we might be, if only we’d let ourselves.”
“And then…?”
“Ah, Margaret,” he’d said. “We’re so far away from those stars.”
Kitty capped her pen and stacked up her writing paper. She feared her father was right. And her mother was right, as well. So many had died in this war already, and no end in sight. And now the wounded had begun coming home in great numbers, too. At the factory where she worked, there was a young man who’d lost an arm and one who was paraplegic. They were the “healthy” wounded. Kitty had heard of others who had come home and wouldn’t leave their houses for some sense of shame they felt. She honestly wondered sometimes which fate was worse, death or standing behind a curtain and looking out at the street at all the things you felt you could no longer have.
“Who wants tea?” she asked, in a voice so small her sisters didn’t hear her.
“STUFFED BEEF HEART LAST NIGHT!” Frank said. “Tonight, boiled tongue! Mother of God, Margaret, can’t we at least have some pork-u-pines?” He meant the little meatballs made mostly from rice but with bits of pork sausage and ground beef in them.