Kitty stared at her pen, checked the level in the Skrip black ink bottle, tightened a pin curl at the base of her neck. She stared out the window, then at the wall. She tried to see what Louise was writing, but her sister caught her and moved her pages away. Kitty watched her, writing and writing and writing with a little smile on her face. What was there to go on about this way?
“What are you saying right now?” Kitty asked, and Louise looked up at her. “It’s personal.”
“What about you, Tish?” Kitty said.
“Mine’s personal, too,” Tish said and kept right on scribbling.
“But…personal about what?” Kitty said.
Now Tish did look up. “You gotta make ’em feel better,” she said. She raised an eyebrow. “You know? You gotta get their minds off the war!”
“But what are you saying to get their minds off the war?” Kitty asked, and Tish said loudly, “You’ve got the guidelines right there! I’m not telling you what I wrote! Make up your own letter!”
From the parlor came their mother’s warning voice. “Girls…”
Kitty tapped her pen against her paper and Louise looked up, irritated. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, tell him how you want to get a cat, or how fierce that thunderstorm was, or how much you liked some movie or book. Say what you’ll do when he comes home. Gosh, Kitty, I never knew you were so…so…”
“So what?” Kitty asked. “You never knew I was so what?”
“Dumb,” Tish said, and Louise laughed and said, “No, not dumb! Just…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I mean, you and Julian! Anybody would think you would have tons to say to him!”
“We do better in person,” Kitty said. And she started a new paragraph about how annoying her sisters were. Yes. Julian used to laugh when she did that. But…She put down her pen and picked at a cuticle. Maybe it would be bad to say that now. Maybe she shouldn’t complain about anything. Maybe he needed to hear only happy things. Had she already told him the salvage joke about how all the housewives were bringing in their fat cans, ha ha? She was pretty sure she had. In fact, now that she thought of it, she remembered it was Julian who had told it to her.
Kitty wound a lock of hair around her finger and sniffed at it. That Kreml shampoo smelled good; Margie Hennessey, who’d told her about it, was right. Margie said the John Robert Powers models used Kreml, and they always married millionaires. Kitty wrote, Margie Hennessey says hi, then shifted her eyes to the kitchen clock. Had it not moved at all since she last looked? She went over and smacked it.
“What are you doing?” Louise asked.
“The doggone clock’s broken,” Kitty said. But it wasn’t. She came back to the table, flung herself into her chair, and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Well, fine, I can’t think of a single thing more to say! Nothing ever happens here! It’s all happening there! And I’ve gotten only one letter from him! There’s nothing to respond to!”
Neither of her sisters dignified this outburst with an answer. Kitty leaned back and crossed one leg over the other. Swung it. Then she remembered something, and she sat up and bent over her page to write, Susie Anderson left work to go and live with her aunt in North Carolina. She’s painting airplanes. Can you imagine? She paints them white on the underbelly, blue on the sides, and green on the top. So if you look from underneath they look like clouds, and from the side they look like sky and from above they look like—Here she stopped to think. What was it Susie had written to Maureen?—like water! she wrote, and then wondered if that was right. And wait—was it North Carolina or South Carolina? Oh, Julian wouldn’t care, and anyway he surely already knew all about camouflage techniques. I wish Ma and Pop would let me get a defense job, she wrote. But she’d told him that before. So she added, I still do wish that. Then she sat lightly tapping her heel against the floor and staring into space while her sisters’ pens scratched and scratched and scratched away.
They heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and their mother appeared in the kitchen to wash out her teacup. “Hey, Ma,” Kitty said. “What should I write to Julian?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” Margaret said and turned to look over her glasses at Kitty.
“Well, if Pop were overseas and you were writing to him, what would you say?”
“I’d ask him how we were able to produce such an unimaginative daughter. Now, listen, girls. Write for another fifteen minutes, and then it’s lights-out. I’m going to need some help housecleaning tomorrow. I can’t go to Red Cross meetings twice a week and keep up with all the housework I used to do.” Louise and Tish sped up their writing. Kitty sighed and rubbed at the back of her neck. She wrote, Ma’s busy with her Red Cross training. Last week, they laid someone out on the table to pretend she was wounded and suffering from shock, and Ma asked the other women what should be done next. One of them said, “Offer him a book.” I swear it’s true! Kitty read over what she’d written, then wondered if it was wise to be talking about being wounded. Maybe it would frighten Julian. Maybe it was bad luck. She thought of what she might say to counteract what she’d written. Nothing came to her. Nothing. And look at the white space still at the bottom of her page. Kitty grabbed Tish’s lipstick, smeared some on her mouth, and made two big kiss marks on her letter. “My lipstick,” Tish said, but she didn’t look up.
Oh, the kiss marks were a wonderful idea. They took up at least four lines. With all my heart, Kitty wrote next and signed off. In the blank space below, she drew a large heart. Surrounded by lace. Punctured by a large arrow. That took up six lines, and it brought her to the end of the page. Done.
Happily, she folded her page and put them into the envelope. She addressed the envelope with the strange Army address, licked the stamp, affixed it, and pounded it with her fist so that it wouldn’t fall off. Wouldn’t that just be the topper?
AFTER HER SISTERS FELL ASLEEP, Kitty lay thinking of Hank, the man she’d danced with. It wasn’t until they were sleeping that she’d felt safe thinking of him—she didn’t want things to come popping out of her mouth and set her sisters off asking ten thousand questions. She didn’t know quite what to make of him. He’d told her such odd things, things very much out of keeping with what everyone else was saying about the war; but it was all so compelling and completely sensible. He’d told her about a young man who’d booed an image of FDR on a newsreel at the movies. The man had been beaten up by the other men around him and fined two hundred dollars in court. But wasn’t freedom of speech one of the things we were fighting for? And the Japanese Americans—should such a violation of their rights be occurring here in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
A few months after Pearl Harbor, Hank had seen a crowd of Japanese Americans waiting to board a train that would take them to internment camps. One of them had been a little girl, no more than four years of age, who sat on top of a suitcase tightly clutching a child’s purse. Huge, overstuffed duffel bags full of her family’s belongings surrounded her. She had an apple in her hand, but she wasn’t eating it; instead, she stared into space, looking frightened and sorrowful. He’d not been able to get the image out of his mind. “Know what I kept thinking?” he’d said to Kitty. “I kept wondering, what had she saved to carry in that little purse?”
On the newsreels, they made it seem as though the Japanese American evacuation was a vacation. But when Kitty told Hank that, he had said, “Some vacation. The day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Americans had their funds frozen and banks refused to cash their checks. Mailmen wouldn’t deliver their mail and the milkmen and grocers wouldn’t serve them, either. Insurance companies canceled their policies. They lost their jobs. And after Walter Lippmann’s column—you know about that column, don’t you?”
Kitty didn’t. She’d made a sound that could have been interpreted as a yes and promised herself to read the paper cover to cover from now on.
Hank had gone on. “Well, after that column, 110,000 people, the entire Japanese community of t
he West, were driven from their homes. They had forty-eight hours to dispose of everything—their houses, their businesses, all their furniture. And their ‘vacation’ was to go to a barren camp surrounded by barbed wire.”
Kitty hadn’t known what to say. It seemed impossible. So she’d said that, and Hank had said yes, but it had happened. He had been an isolationist and a member of America First up until Pearl Harbor, because he didn’t believe in war as an answer in supposedly civilized times. After December 7, he’d become a conscientious objector, doing public service as an orderly in a hospital. Then, because of an injured soldier he had cared for there, he’d changed his mind and enlisted. Why? Kitty had asked. What had happened to make him change his mind? He’d looked at her, contemplating whether or not to answer. Then he’d smiled and said he’d tell her another time, in a letter, how about that? How about if they corresponded?
He was an Army flier who had just completed training for aerial reconnaissance. These men dropped no bombs—they simply took photographs. He told her they flew at great heights and at great speeds, often in deepest night, and they flew completely unarmed. One reason was that the cameras added so much weight; another was the assumption that if a pilot had guns on his plane, he might want to fight back instead of quickly returning to base with those valuable photos.
Hank was on his way overseas. Overseas where? Kitty had asked. He’d leaned in toward her and said in a low voice, “Now, you know I can’t tell you that.” And Kitty had felt a zipperlike thrill run up her back, then felt immediately guilty. But what was a girl to do? It was a completely natural reaction. Although it had been only a few weeks, it felt like an eternity since a man’s face had come near hers.
Mostly, Kitty had just liked talking to Hank. And she’d given him her address. Oh, he knew she was practically engaged—she’d told him all about Julian. She’d told him how they met, how they wanted four children: two boys and two girls. She’d told him about Frank and Margaret and her brothers; and she had pointed out her sisters, about whom he’d said, “Wow! Beautiful girls!” He hadn’t said she was pretty, and she’d rather liked that he hadn’t. She’d liked, too, the light way he put his hand on her back when they waltzed to the slow ones, the way he listened so intently to what she said, not only listened but asked questions in order to understand better. Henry was his name, but he preferred Hank in the same way that she preferred Kitty to Katherine. “I always think I’m in trouble if someone calls me Henry,” he’d told her. “Me, too,” she’d said, and then quickly added, “Well, I mean when they call me Katherine, not Henry!” She’d flushed at the foolishness of that remark; of course he knew that! But Hank had only said, “And if they call you by all three names, you’re really in for it!” He had asked what her middle name was, and she had told him it was Grace; his, he’d said, was Carter, after his maternal grandfather. Kitty thought it was strange, telling a man you’d just met your middle name. In some ways it felt more intimate than a kiss.
Henry Carter Cunningham III, although about this last he’d said, “Not that kind of ‘the Third.’ I’m afraid my circumstances might best be described as modest. More dreams than dollars are generated in my family.” Hank Cunningham, from San Francisco, California. Kitty covered her mouth and held back a laugh, and for the life of her, she didn’t know why.
She closed her eyes and thought about Julian. Where was he, right now? What was he doing? Playing cards? Dodging bullets? Eating rehydrated pears? When would she hear from him again? What if he…? Her stomach dropped and her hands grew cold. You never knew. You never heard right away. And sometimes the information you got was false. She’d heard about a family who’d been told their soldier was dead when he was just as alive as he could be! She’d also heard about a guy who was said to have sustained a “minor injury,” but he died from a massive head wound.
Here she’d been complaining about not hearing from Julian, and he might not be able to write! How would she know? She felt like biting her knuckles, yanking at her hair. But what good would that do? She needed to be strong for him. Cheerful. She needed to be less selfish and to try much harder when she wrote to him. Surely she could do better than she had. She was never much of a writer—or a reader, for that matter—as Louise was. Even Tish liked reading a lot better than Kitty. Well, face it; everyone in the family liked reading better than Kitty. Even Billy liked his books. “Geronimoooo!” he’d yell, running through the house with one of his books about, well, Geronimo. But Kitty was not a reader. She was a doer—the kind of person books were written about, she thought, privately consoling herself.
She wondered what Louise’s letters to Michael were like. And his to her. Already, Louise had gotten four. The first one was practically a novel. Kitty knew where Louise kept those letters—in her underwear drawer. If Kitty could read one, she would be better able to write to Julian. She’d know the tone she should take, the things Julian might be longing to hear. Not that Julian and Michael were that much alike, but still…
“Louise?” she whispered to the still form beside her. Nothing. She sat up and looked at Tish, sprawled out at the bottom of the bed. “Tish?” Again, nothing. Slowly, she pulled back the covers, got out of bed, put on her robe, and tiptoed over to the bureau. Holding her breath, she soundlessly slid open the drawer and reached under a pile of Louise’s slips. There. A pack of letters, a length of blue velvet ribbon holding them together. She removed the letter on top and slipped it into her pocket, closed the drawer, and tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. She locked the door, sat on the lid of the toilet, and pulled the onionskin pages from the envelope. She reminded herself to put the letter back exactly as she’d found it—the folded crease toward the bottom of the envelope. She hesitated for a moment, shame burning at the edges of her stomach. This was such an invasion of privacy! Really, if she were going to do this, she should read Tish’s letters. But those weren’t real relationships that Tish had. They were flirtations, distractions. Good for the men’s morale, Kitty agreed, but surely lacking the kind of thing that might inspire her to write more easily to Julian. Louise would never know Kitty had done this, and she would be glad if Kitty were better able to write Julian; she and Julian liked each other very much. And anyway, hadn’t Kitty readily shown Louise the letter Julian had sent? Fair was fair. She tucked her hair behind her ears, opened the pages and started to read, then stopped when she heard a knock on the door.
Hastily, she shoved the pages back into the envelope, the envelope into her robe pocket. “Yes?” she said.
“Is that you, then, Kitty?” Her father.
“Yes, Pa.”
“Well, hurry it up, girl, I’ve got a bit of an emergency.”
Kitty opened the door. Here and there, her father’s hair stood on end, as though he were being selectively electrocuted. His face was creased with elongated Xs, and his pajamas had shifted sideways. No one looked more comical rising from sleep than Frank Heaney. “Here’s our Tom, come home after his nightly catfight,” their mother said every morning. “’Tis our own Clark Gable,” their father always answered.
“I can let you go first,” Kitty told him.
“God love you. Ben Macalister, our venerable block captain, stopped over tonight. If that man were invited to a wedding, he’d stay for the christening. And me drinking the water and drinking the water just to stay awake.” He squeezed past her and quickly closed the door.
Out in the hall, Kitty rubbed her fingers along the rough edge of the envelope in her pocket. Was this divine intervention? Was she being given a chance to reconsider her imminent misdeed? She leaned against the wall and stared up at the ceiling, debating. In the corner, she saw a huge spiderweb, the owner and occupant hanging heavy in the center. Tomorrow, she’d clean it away, although she was frightened to death of spiders. Penance. And here came the sound of the chain being pulled and the toilet flushing. Yes. God had made a deal with her. Go ahead in there and read it, now that we understand each other.
Frank came out of the
bathroom and kissed her cheek as he passed by. “Night, darlin’. Give my regards to the wee ones.” The fairies, he meant; those beautiful gossamer creatures he used to tell his children would visit at night, but only after they fell asleep. Which made them struggle to stay awake, of course, hopeful of seeing one. Only in the last year or so had Binks abandoned sleeping with a Mason jar by his bed.
“Night, Pa,” she said, innocent as an angel. Really, she could be an actress. She wasn’t the only one who said so.
Seated again on the toilet lid, she pulled out the letter and read.
26 April 1943
Somewhere in England
Dearest Louise,
I knew I would miss you like bing, of course, but the severity of my longing is taking me a bit by surprise—my heart is quite literally heavy all the time. Guess I’m homesick in a big way: I miss you and my parents and you and steak and you and fresh fruit and you and the baseball games with the gang and you and Lake Michigan and you and movies and you and you and you! (Remember how I used to tell my English students to avoid redundancy? Never mind—don’t you know there’s a war on?)
The train ride was largely uneventful—extremely crowded, of course, and boisterously loud at some times, then strangely silent at others. A lot of guys lost inside their heads, I imagine, wondering what their fates would be, myself included. A couple of times, waking up disoriented from a nodding-off kind of nap, I came close to regretting the day that Julian and I decided to enlist together. (Honestly, we were not drunk!) But as I tried to explain before, there are some things I just have to do. I want to feel at the end of this thing that I did my part, and not by staying at a job deemed essential to the war effort. I know it doesn’t make sense to you, Louise, but I want to be on the front lines, with the infantry. If I’m going to be in this thing, then let me be in it. You can have all the air and sea support imaginable, but in the end a war is lost or won because of the foot soldier. I have a great deal of admiration for the Marines fighting at Wake Island who were being pounded by the Japs in ’41. Do you remember that story? How when the Navy was finally able to get through to them and asked if they wanted anything, they said, “Yeah, more Japs!”? I confess I am not so interested in dying in battle as they seem to be (some Marine sergeant is said to have bellowed to his badly wounded platoon, “C’mon, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”), but they do have my utmost respect.