It was strange. When she used to fantasize about living with Julian, she pictured scenes straight out of a magazine. But when she thought about living with Hank, she imagined them on a burgundy sofa she’d never seen anywhere, books lined up neatly behind them on floor-to-ceiling shelves, artifacts from their travels here and there: a painting from the Left Bank in Paris, a mask from Africa. They would travel, she was sure of it, even though they’d never really talked about it. But she was curious about so many of the places Hank had described; she wanted to see them for herself.
Kitty picked up the last letter, the one with the unknown name. She knew already what she’d find inside: Dear Kitty (or Miss Heaney; a lot of them liked to be a little formal when they first wrote). I am the man from———whom you danced with at the Kelly Club. I hope you remember me, because I sure remember you. They almost all started out with some version of that. But when Kitty opened the letter, what she read was Kitty, it’s Michael here, just writing to thank you for all those Christmas presents you sent. All what Christmas presents? She’d sent only cigarettes. Her parents had sent him socks and hard candy and a salami and the heart-shield Catholic prayer book. They’d ordered it from a magazine ad that suggested you “Give your hero God’s weapon.” On the cover of the gold-plated steel front cover, they’d had engraved MAY THIS KEEP YOU SAFE FROM HARM.
Michael continued:
I hope I don’t bore you, but I’m going to tell you about opening each one, what a delight it was, and also I’ll write a little poem about each gift.
And then, suddenly,
Kitty, I have to tell you something and I don’t want you to let anyone know.
She looked quickly over at Tish. Making the most of the one letter she was writing, she was busy illustrating it; she’d begun sending drawings the fellows found amusing, including one of her hiking her skirt up to well above her knees and winking. “Better not let Ma or Pop see that,” Louise had said. And then, “Give me that.” She’d regarded the drawing carefully, then handed it back to her sister, one eyebrow raised.
Kitty positioned the letter to make sure Tish couldn’t see it, and read on:
I know you and Tish have been writing to a fair number of men, and I suppose every now and then one of them talks about the “jits.” But just in case they haven’t, let me explain it to you. It stands for “jitters,” of course, and I’d guess every man gets them sooner or later. But I seem suddenly to have them all the time. I can’t hold a fork without watching it shake in my hand.
I feel sure that I’m going to get it. I never thought that before, but now I just feel sure. I’ve dreamed about my death. I’ve seen exactly how it happens, a bullet right below my helmet on the right side, coming out of nowhere. I’ve seen myself lying on the ground, one leg bent up, my rifle not far from my hand. I’m sorry to write this to you, Kitty, sorry if it upsets you, but I just have to tell someone. I only hope the censors miss this. A buddy of mine said he knows that some censors just look at the beginning and the end, or that some letters slip by unread except to briefly scan for the names of places that would give away our location—there are so very many letters for them to go through!—and that is why I began this letter the way I did. I will end it the same way.
One reason for my telling you this is an odd one. I want someone to know I knew, and here will be the evidence. I don’t know why that’s so important to me. Maybe to reassure you all that I had time to get ready. I am getting ready, trying to think that if this is all I get of life, I’ll make the best of it. I’ll do my duty as honorably as I can, and I’ll know that my sacrifice helped us win the war. We will win the war. But the main reason I’m writing is to ask you to promise you’ll look after Louise in every way you can. I’m so worried about what will happen to her. Without the baby, she could have found another man, in time. It hurts me to think of her with someone else, but it’s worse to think of her alone. And now with a baby it will be so much harder. You’ve told me more than once that you’d do anything for your sisters—and your brothers—and I hope that’s true. I know your mom and pop will help, the whole family, but you’re the one she really relies on outside of me. You know that, right? If you could just write me back saying you’ll do that, it sure would help to ease my mind. Promise me in writing, Kitty. You don’t need to send a whole letter or anything, I know how you girls stay up late writing letters each night. Just tell me yes and send it right away. I know exactly where I’m going to keep it.
And the socks! Well, I guess they’re appreciated almost more than anything else. Here is my poem for them: Socks in a box are okay, I suggest. But socks that you knit are the very best. Well, I’ve gone on enough for one letter. Let me just sign off now with a hearty thanks for all you’ve done and will do. Regards to your family.
With love,
Michael
Kitty sat still, staring straight ahead. Then she quietly pulled out a V-mail form. On it she wrote, Dear Michael, Someday we will share a laugh over this. But for now, I will only tell you yes. Of course yes. Take care of yourself. We all love you so. Kitty.
She sealed the letter and put in the middle of the others she’d written.
“That was a fast one!” Tish said.
“Just a little note to some guy I danced with.”
“Are you going to write to old Shorty?”
“Who?”
“That little guy you danced with tonight, the one who came up to your knees.”
Kitty smiled. “He’s not so dumb. He picks tall women so he can put his face…Well. you know.” She picked up the letters. “Feel like a walk? I’m going out to mail these.”
“Heck, no!” Tish said. “It’s freezing out there, and I’m beat. I’m going to bed. But take mine, would you?”
Kitty put her galoshes on over her slippers, congratulating herself on her reverse psychology. If she had started to go out without inviting Tish to join her, her sister would have insisted on coming along.
Kitty put her coat on over her robe and slipped outside. The street was so quiet. Frost sparkled on the sidewalk and made her boots stick to the concrete. She looked up into the sky. Poor Michael. He needed a rest. When would he get one? She’d heard about a correspondent who, when he had encountered one dead man too many, would not pray but instead would repeat some pleasant sentence over and over in his mind: I’m lying on the beach in California. She hoped Michael was able to do that sometimes: absent himself from everything around him, at least in his mind. What would she say, Kitty wondered, if she needed a sentence like that? It came to her immediately: I’m home. I’m home. I’m home. She thought that if Michael had a sentence, that was his, too.
She thought about the first time he’d seen Louise. The sisters had gone bowling with a bunch of other girls, and there in the lane next to them was Michael, out with a bunch of guys. He had the curls and pink cheeks of a cherub, the girls agreed later. But otherwise he was all man, tall, broad-shouldered, and square-jawed. After he’d caught sight of Louise, he had never looked away except when it was his turn to bowl, and even then, it was clear his mind wasn’t on the game. “Come on, O’Conner,” his friends had kept saying. “Watch the ball, wouldja?” He’d been so shy, so hesitant, and yet so determined when he came over to introduce himself. And Louise, blushing and so uncharacteristically unsure of herself. When she got home, she sat right down at the kitchen table and said, “Ma? I’ve met someone.” She hadn’t taken her coat off, or even her kerchief.
“Again?” Margaret had said. She’d been busy making dinner, only half listening.
“No,” Louise had said. “Not ‘again.’ For the first time.”
Margaret had stopped stirring and come over to plant a kiss on her daughter’s forehead. That was all. That was enough.
At the mailbox, Kitty looked down at the letter in her hand. In a little while, it would be in Michael’s hand. Such an amazing fact, that in the midst of a war, the mail came. That a man took time from trying to kill—and not be killed—to re
ad a letter about how his son had learned that day to walk, how his girl lay in bed at night, longing for him. Kitty wished she could tuck herself inside an envelope every now and then and make the trip to one of the many places she and her sisters sent letters to. She imagined herself flying across some vast ocean and stepping out onto foreign soil, just an American girl come to stand before American boys. It would be like a USO tour, only better. They wouldn’t have to come to her; she would come to them, close up. All she wanted to do was wander around a camp smiling at those boys, an unspoken message in her eyes. And what was the message? Gratitude, most profoundly.
Kitty started to drop the letter into the mailbox, then pulled it back and kissed it. For one moment, she wondered about the propriety of such a thing. Then she laughed out loud, her breath making a puffy little cloud before her. What had they so often said in their household? If one Heaney girl loved you, the three of them did. And if you loved one Heaney girl, you loved them all.
When she climbed the porch steps, shivering, Kitty thought about the boys who slept outside in the cold. How did they do it? She sat on the top step and looked at her watch. How long she could last out here, a few steps from her own front door? Could she last fifteen minutes?
But they were lying on the ground, those boys. Kitty moved over to the corner of the porch and lay down, her knees hunched up close to her chest. It hurt her hip to lie this way, her shoulder. It made her dizzy to be without a pillow.
So hard to imagine, in any true sense, how the boys at the front lived. They were filthy dirty and without any semblance of routine or familiar surroundings. They were so far away—physically, yes, but even more important, psychologically—from all the things in their life that once meant stability, that meant home. No family or old friends. No beds or chairs or kitchen tables or toothbrush stowed neatly in its holder. No walls! Instead, the men awakened in a new place, sometimes every day, and lived by instinct, like animals.
Maybe, though, they were too tired to feel bad for themselves, too tired to feel much of anything. Kitty had read about the crushing kind of fatigue those soldiers endured, and still they went on, because they had to. Last August, in Sicily, the men of the 1st Division were on the front lines for twenty-eight days, walking and fighting all that time. Twenty-eight days! The moon went through its phases, Kitty went to the factory and browsed at the Fair store and saw movies at the Paradise, with its immense staircase and statues and fountains and ceiling full of stars. She went to Fritzl’s restaurant and, stuffed, pushed away a plate with good-tasting, hot food still on it. She laughed and talked and slept late on Saturday and fingered the fine fabrics of the dresses she could now afford to buy. In twenty-eight days, birthdays were celebrated and weddings were performed. Women came to term and delivered and went home with their new babies, and all the while the men were walking and fighting, walking and fighting. No more talk about what they were going to do to those sons of bitches when they finally got over there. Now they were there. Now they were in it, and Kitty couldn’t help but think that most all of those boys, those clench-fisted, wide-eyed boys talking so boldly about teaching those Nazis a lesson, now wanted only to come home. Especially the young ones, those who were learning to shave at the same time they were learning how to eviscerate the enemy.
When they lay down at night, what kind of sorrow overtook those men? Or maybe sorrow was a luxury they couldn’t afford. And anyway, maybe when you were that tired, you didn’t think about anything before sleep. You were probably just grateful that you could sleep at all. Kitty made a pillow of her arm, to keep her face from pressing against the cold floorboards.
So maybe it was something like this, only with the presence of extreme danger. Did fear make you warmer? She closed her eyes, imagining that all around her were unseen enemies, and that although she needed to sleep, she also needed to stay alert. She imagined a whistling in the air, a mortar shell coming in, how she’d have to get out of the way and run. She rolled over and over as quickly as she could in her coat and galoshes and then jumped to her feet, holding an imaginary automatic rifle.
The front door opened, and there stood Frank, squinting at her, clutching his bathrobe tightly around his throat.
“For the love of Mike, what are you doing out here?”
“Nothing,” Kitty said.
“Sure I thought Bushman the gorilla had escaped from the Lincoln Park Zoo!”
“Sorry, Pop.”
He looked around the porch, pushing down on his hair, which stood right up again. “Are you all alone out here, then?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come inside. ’Tis late! What were you doing out here?”
“I mailed some letters.” Kitty walked past him, refraining from hugging him, which was what she wanted to do. She felt as though she’d been far away, to a terrible place, and now here she was walking into her own house, safe. The thought of her bed and her sisters upstairs made her feel like weeping.
“I’m going to have a glass of milk and a wee bit of jelly roll,” Frank said. “Will you join me?” He spoke quietly, for after dinner Margaret had given the family explicit instructions not to touch that jelly roll; she wanted to serve it again the next night.
“I will,” Kitty said. She took off her coat and galoshes and went into the kitchen.
“We’ll both be tired in the morning,” Frank said. “And in a fair amount of trouble with the crossed-arms missus!”
Kitty said she knew. Somehow, she was honored. She sat down at the table.
Frank poured them each a glass of milk and cut them not ungenerous slices of jelly roll. He clinked his glass with hers. “Here’s to my wife and great love of my life,” he said. And then, leaning in conspiratorially, “May they never meet!”
Kitty’s eyes filled with tears.
“I’m only joking!” Frank said.
“I know, Pop,” Kitty said. “I just was thinking about our boys. I just feel so sorry for them.”
Frank nodded. “All of us do. And always it’s a struggle not to give in to that sadness. But you know why we mustn’t, don’t you?”
Kitty shrugged.
Frank put his hand on her shoulder. “Here now, look me in the eye.”
Reluctantly, she did.
“Those boys are doing their part, every one of them, God love them. And to me, they’re all heroes, whether they fall in battle or sit at a desk stateside. But you know this, Kitty, sure I’ve said it often enough: We’re all fighting this war, dressed in a uniform or not. And where the part of the boys overseas is the fighting and the part of the boy stateside is to do the best job he can do to support them, our job is to remain proud and optimistic. We on the home front have to be the bright place those boys can come to in their minds. And we offer our own kind of ammunition: the belief that they’re doing the right thing. We must support them fully in every way we can, and we must wait patiently for them to come home.”
“And if they don’t?” Kitty asked, bitterly.
Frank nodded. He sat still for some time, staring into his empty glass. Finally, he looked up at her and said, “We live but a short time, at the longest. How do we make our lives mean something? If we die in glory, with our minds and our hearts fixed on achieving a great goal, we have lived a life that mattered.
“What fate decides an illness, or some terrible accident? Who can guarantee any of us another day, whether we are here on Pine Street in Chicago, Illinois, or on the beaches of Sicily? The boys who are fighting this war know that they will make a difference today and in all the years to come. They know that, whether they come home or not, they have helped write a mighty page of history. They know it, it lives large inside them, and as hard as it may be for you to understand, I believe that even the youngest of them are resigned to it. It may seem selfish for us to enjoy ourselves when they suffer so. But part of the reason for us to do it is so that we can tell them about it. When you girls write those men about a meal you had or a walk you took or a movie you saw, you’re
giving them the experience to have with you. When you tell a soldier how proud you are of him, he is prouder of himself. Whenever those boys get a letter, they are for a few precious moments taken far away from a hellish place—sure you know they call letters from home ten-minute furloughs!
“But, Kitty, over there is where those boys want and need to be. If it doesn’t start out that way, it ends up being that way. Men in combat love one another, and although they hate war, they love it, too. I experienced it myself. A soldier needs to believe with all his heart in his commander and his mission, and he needs for us to believe in him. How do we show him that we do? Not by mourning the fact that he’s there but by celebrating the life we are privileged to lead on account of his sacrifice.”
Kitty bit at her lip; she felt dangerously close to bursting into tears.
“All right?” Frank asked gently.
She nodded.
“Off to bed, then, for the both of us, and may the good Lord help the one faces Margaret first.”
“I’m not afraid of her,” Kitty said.
“’Course you are, and so am I. She’s a formidable woman. But she makes a lovely jelly roll.”
When Kitty crawled into bed beside Louise, she felt her sister’s wakefulness. “Good night,” she whispered.
“Good night,” Louise said. And then, “I heard everything Pop said. He’s right, you know.”
Kitty said nothing. She still wanted to believe that there were other ways to settle things than war after war after war. But when Louise took her hand, she squeezed it.
TWO DAYS LATER, WHEN KITTY CAME HOME from work, she thumbed through her pile of mail on the front hall table. There was another letter from Michael. He had used the same false name as last time, and the same boxy print, so different from his usual elegant script. Kitty slipped the letter into her pants pocket and took it upstairs to the bathroom to read it.