On September first, 1939, ten years after Black Tuesday, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war against Germany. World War II had started.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The Frantic Forties
In the summer of 1940 Brian and I were living in Chicago at 6105 Woodlawn, an address just south of the Midway. It was a large apartment building, eighty units, owned by the Howard Foundation through a dummy. We occupied what was called “the Penthouse”—the west end of the top floor, a living room and balcony, a kitchen, four bedrooms, two baths.
We needed the extra bedrooms, especially in July during the Democratic National Convention. For two weeks we had from twelve to fifteen people sleeping in an apartment intended for a maximum of eight. I do not recommend this. The apartment did not have airconditioning, it was an exceptionally hot summer, and Lake Michigan a few hundred yards away turned our flat into a Turkish bath. At home I would have coped with it by walking around in my skin. But I could not do so in the presence of strangers. One of the real benefits of Boondock is that skin is just skin—means nothing.
I had not been in Chicago other than to change trains since 1893. Brian had frequently visited Chicago without me, as this flat was often used for Howard Foundation board meetings, the Foundation having moved its registered address from Toledo to Winnipeg in 1929. As Justin explained it to me, “Maureen, while we don’t advertise what we’re doing, we won’t be breaking any laws about private ownership of gold; we are simply planning for whatever develops. The Foundation is now restructured under Canadian law, and its registered secretary is a Canadian lawyer, who is in fact a Howard client himself and a Foundation trustee. I never touch gold, even with gloves on.”
(Brian expressed it otherwise. “No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law. Nor does he feel guilt over breaking it. He simply follows the Eleventh Commandment.”)
This time Brian was not in Chicago for a board meeting; he was there to watch the Chicago commodities market and to deal in it, because of the war in Europe—while I was in Chicago because I wanted to be. Much as I enjoyed being a brood mare, after forty years of it and seventeen babies, I relished seeing something other than wet diapers.
There was indeed much to see. The parkway a hundred yards north of us, stretching from Washington Park to Jackson Park and called the Midway Plaisance, was in fact a midway the last time I had seen it, with everything from Little Egypt’s belly dance to pink cotton candy. Now it was a beautiful grassy park, with the matchless Fountain of Time by Lorado Taft at the west end and the lovely Fifty-seventh Street beach at the east end. The main campus of the University of Chicago, great gray Gothic buildings, dominated its north side. The university had been founded the year before I had come here as a girl, but none of these buildings had been built by then—as near as I could recall several major exhibit halls had occupied the ground now constituting the campus. I could not be certain, as nothing looked the same.
The elevated trains were much more widespread and now they were powered by electricity instead of steam. On the surface there were no longer horse cars or even cable cars; electric trolley cars had replaced them. No more horses anywhere—autos bumper to bumper, a dubious improvement.
The Field Museum, three miles to the north and on the lake, had been founded after my long visit in ’93; its Malvina Hoffman exhibit, The Races of Man, was in itself worth a trip to the Windy City. Near it was the Adler Planetarium, the first one I ever visited. I loved the shows at the planetarium; they let me daydream of traveling among the stars like Theodore—but I did not dream that I would ever really do so. That hope was buried, along with my heart, somewhere in France.
Chicago in ’93 had kept eleven-year-old Maureen Johnson round-eyed; Chicago in 1940 kept Maureen Smith, now officially forty-one years old, still more round-eyed, there were so many new wonders to see.
One change I did not like: in 1893 if I happened to be out after dark, Father did not worry and neither did I. In 1940 I was careful never to be caught out after dark, other than on Brian’s arm.
Just before the 1940 Democratic convention the “Phony War” ended and France fell. On June sixth at Dunkirk, France, the British evacuated what was left of their army and that was followed by one of the greatest speeches in all histories: “—we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the streets, we shall never surrender—”
Father telephoned Brian, told him that he was signing up with the AFS. “Brian, this time even the Home Guard says I’m too old. But these folks are signing up medics the Army won’t accept. They want them for support service in war zones and they’ll take anybody who can saw off a leg—meaning me. If this is the only way I can fight the Huns, then this is what I’ll do—I owe that to Ted Bronson. Understand me, sir?”
“I quite understand.”
“How soon can you put somebody else here to watch the youngsters?”
I could hear both sides, so I took the phone. “Father, Brian can’t come home now but I can. Although I may be able to put Betty Lou there in my place even quicker. Either way, you can go ahead with your plans. But, Father, listen to me. You take care of yourself! Do you hear me?”
“I’ll be careful, Daughter.”
“Please do so, please! I’m proud of you, sir. And Theodore is proud of you, too. I know.”
“I shall try to make both you and Ted proud of me, Maureen.”
I said good-bye quickly and hung up before my voice broke. Briney was looking thoughtful. “I’ll have to get busy right away and correct my age with the Army. Or they might start saying that I am too old.”
“Briney! Surely you don’t expect to convince the Army that you are your Howard age? They have years and years of records on you.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t try to tell the adjutant general my Howard age. Although I don’t think I look any older than the forty-six it says on my driver’s license. I mean that I want to correct the little white lie I told in 1898. When I was actually fourteen but swore that I was twenty-one so that they would let me enlist.”
“Fourteen indeed! You were a senior at Rolla.”
“I was precocious, just like our children. Yes, dearest, I was a senior at Rolla in ’98. But there is nobody left in the War Department who knows that. And nobody is likely to tell them. Maureen, a reserve colonel fifty-six years old is a lot more likely to be ordered to duty than one who is sixty-three. About one hundred percent more likely.”
▣
I’m using a Time-agent’s field recorder keyed to my voice and concealed in a body cavity. No, no, not concealed in the tunnel of love; that would not do, as Time agents aren’t nuns and are not expected to be. I mean an artificial cavity about where my gall bladder used to be. This gadget is supposed to be good for a thousand hours and I hope it is working properly because, if these spooks scrag me—better make that “when they scrag me”—I hope that Pixel can lead somebody to my corpse and thereby let the Time Corps retrieve the record. I want the Circle to understand what I was trying to do. I should have done it openly, I suppose, but Lazarus would have grabbed it away from me. I have perfect hindsight—not so good in the other direction.
▣
Brian did manage to “correct” his War Department age, simply because his general wanted him. But he did not manage to get himself ordered to a combat command. Instead combat came to him—he was holding down a desk at the Presidio and we were living in an old mansion on Knob Hill when the Japanese pulled their sneak attack on San Francisco, December 7, 1941.
It is an odd feeling to look up into the sky, see planes overhead, feel their engines deep in your bones, see their bellies give birth to bombs, and know that it is too late to run, too late to hide, and that you have no control whatever over where those bombs will hit—on you or on houses a block away. The feeling was not terror; it was more a sense of déjà vu, as if I had been there a thousand times before. I don’t care to feel it again but I know why warriors
(real ones, not wimps in uniform) always seek combat assignments, not desk jobs. It is in the presence of death that one lives most intensely. “Better one crowded hour of life—”
I have read that in time line three this sneak attack was made on Hawaii, not San Francisco, and that California Japanese were thereafter moved back from the coast. If so, they were extremely lucky, for that spared them the blood bath that took place in time line two, where more than sixty thousand Japanese-Americans were lynched or shot or (in some cases) burned alive on Sunday through Tuesday, December 7-9, 1941. Did this affect what we did to Tokyo and Kobe later? I wonder.
Wars that start with sneak attacks are certain to be merciless; all the histories prove it.
As one result of those lynch mobs President Barkley placed California under martial law. In April 1942 this was eased off and only the twenty-mile strip inland from the mean high-tide line was militarized, but the zone was extended up the coast to Canada. In San Francisco this caused no special inconvenience—it was much like living on a military reservation and a marked improvement over San Francisco’s usual civic corruption—but after dark on the coast itself there was always a danger that some sixteen-year-old boy in a National Guard uniform, armed with a World War I Springfield, might get nervous and trigger happy.
Or so I heard; I never risked it. The beach from Canada to Mexico was a combat zone; anyone on it after dark was risking sudden death and many found it.
I had my youngest with me, Donald, four, and Priscilla, two. My school-age children—Alice, Doris, Patrick, and Susan—were in Kansas City with Betty Lou. I had thought of Arthur Roy as being school age (born 1924), but his cousin Nelson swore him into the Marine Corps the day after the bombing of San Francisco, along with his older brother Richard (born 1914); they went to Pendleton together. Nelson was on limited duty, having left a foot in Belleau Wood in 1918. Justin was on the War Production Board, based in Washington but traveling rather steadily; he stayed with us on Knob Hill several times.
Woodrow I did not see even once until the war was over. I received a Christmas card from him in December 1941, postmarked Pensacola, Florida: “Dear Mom and Pop, I’m hiding out from the Nips and teaching Boy Scouts how to fly upside down. Heather and the kids are stashed for the duration at Avalon Beach, PO Box 6320, SO I sleep home most nights. Merry Christmas and have a nice war. Woodrow.”
The next we heard from Woodrow was a card from the Royal Hawaiian at Waikiki: “The service here is not quite up to peacetime standards but it is better than that at Lahaina. Despite any rumors to the contrary the sharks in Lahaina Roads are not vegetarians. Hoping you are the same. W.W.”
That was our first intimation that Woodrow had been in the Battle of Lahaina Roads. Whether he was in the Saratoga when she was sunk, or whether he ditched from the air, I do not know. But his card implies that he was in the water at some point. I asked him about this after the war. He looked puzzled and said, “Mom, where did you get that notion? I spent the war in Washington, D.C., drinking Scotch with my opposite number in the British Aircraft Commission. His Scotch, it was—he had worked out a scam to fly it in from Bermuda.”
Woodrow was not always strictly truthful.
Let me see—Theodore Ira, my World War I baby, went to active duty with Kansas City’s 110th Combat Engineers and spent most of the war in Noumea, building air strips and docks and such. Nancy’s husband and Eleanor’s son, Jonathan, had stayed in the Reserve but not in the Guard; he was a column commander in Patton’s Panzers when they drove the Russians out of Czechoslovakia. Nancy helped organize the WAAC and finished the war senior to her husband, to the vast amusement of all of us—even Jonathan. George started out in the Thirty-fifth Division HQ but wound up in the OSS, so I don’t know what he did. In March 1944 Brian Junior made the landing at Marseilles, caught a piece of shrapnel in his left thigh, and wound up back in Salisbury, England, an executive officer in the training command.
My letters to Father were returned to me in 1942, along with a formal letter of regret from the national headquarters of the AFS.
Richard’s wife, Marian, stayed in nearby San Juan Capistrano while Richard was at Camp Pendleton. When he shipped out, I invited her to move in with us, with her children—four, and one that was born shortly after she arrived. We could make room for them and it was actually easier for us two women to take care of seven children than it had been for each of us to cope with our own unassisted. We worked things out so that one of us could assist at Letterman Army Hospital every afternoon, going to the Presidio by bus (no gasoline ration expended) and coming back with Brian. I was fond of Marian; she was as dear to me as my own daughters.
So it came about that she was with us when she received that telegram; Richard had earned the Navy Cross on Iwo Jima—posthumously.
A little over five months later we destroyed Tokyo and Kobe. Then Emperor Akihito and his ministers shocked us all by ritually disemboweling themselves, first the ministers, then the emperor, after the emperor announced to them that his mind had been quieted by President Barkley’s promise to spare Kyoto. It was especially shocking in that Emperor Akihito was just a boy, not yet twelve, younger than my son Patrick Henry.
We will never understand the Japanese. But the long war was over.
I am forced to wonder what would have happened if the emperor’s father, Emperor Hirohito, had not died in the “Star Festival” air strike, July seventh? He was reputed to be so “Westernized.” The other pertinent histories, time lines three and six, give no firm answers. Hirohito seems to have been the captive of his ministers, reigning but not ruling.
Once Japan surrendered Brian asked for early separation, but was sent to Texas—Amarillo, then Dallas—to assist in contract terminations (the only time, I think, that he regretted having passed his bar examinations back in 1938). But moving away from San Francisco at that time was a good idea—a change of background to a place where we knew no one—because on arrival in Texas Marian became “Maureen J. Smith” and I dyed my hair and became her widowed mother, Marian Hardy. None too soon; she was already showing—four months later she gave birth to Richard Brian. We kept it straight with the Foundation, of course, and registered Marian’s new baby correctly: Marian Justin Hardy + Brian Smith, Sr.
What happened next is difficult for me to talk about, because there are three points of view and mine is only one of those three. I am certain that the other two are each as fair-minded as I am, if not more so. “More so,” I think I must concede, as Father had warned me, more than half a century earlier, that I was an amoral wretch who could reason only pragmatically, not morally.
I had not tried to keep my husband out of my daughter-in-law’s bed. Neither Briney nor I had ever tried to own each other; we both approved of sex for fun and we had established our rules for civilized adultery many years earlier. I was a bit surprised that Marian had apparently made no effort to keep from getting pregnant by Brian…but only in that she did not consult me ahead of time. (If she consulted Briney, he never mentioned it. But men do have this tendency to spray sperm around like a fire hose while letting the females decide whether or not to make practical use of the juice.)
Nevertheless I was not angry, just mildly surprised. And I do recognize the normal biological reflex under which the first thing a freshly bereft widow does, if she can manage it, is to spread her legs and sob bitterly and use her womb to replace the dear departed. It is a survival mechanism, one not limited to wars but more prevalent in wartime, as statistical analysis demonstrates.
(I hear that there are men who watch the newspapers for funerals, then attend those of married men in order to meet new widows. This is shooting fish down a well and probably merits castration. On the other hand, those widows might not thank us.)
So we moved to Dallas and everything was satisfactory for a while. Brian was simply a man with two wives, a situation not unknown among Howards—just pull the shades against the neighbors, like some Mormons.
A short time after th
e birth of Marian’s new baby Brian came to me with something on his mind, something he had trouble articulating. I finally said, “Look, dearest, I am not a mindreader. Whatever it is, just spill it.”
“Marian wants a divorce.”
“Huh? Briney, I’m confused. If she’s not happy with us, all she needs to do is to move out; it doesn’t take a divorce. In fact I don’t see how she could get one. But I’m terribly sorry to hear it. I thought we had gone to considerable trouble to make things happy for her. And for Richard Brian and her other children. Do you want me to talk to her? Try to find out what the trouble is?”
“Uh—Damn it, I didn’t make myself clear. She wants you to get a divorce so that she can marry me.”
My jaw dropped, then I laughed. “Goodness, Briney, what in the world makes her think I would ever do that? I don’t want to divorce you; you’re the nicest husband a gal ever had. I don’t mind sharing you—but, darling, I don’t want to get rid of you. I’ll tell her so. Where is she? I’ll take her to bed and tell her so as sweetly as possible.” I reached up, took his shoulders and kissed him.
Then I continued to hold his shoulders and look up at him. “Hey, wait a minute. You want a divorce. Don’t you?”
Briney didn’t say anything; he just looked embarrassed.
I sighed. “Poor Briney. Us frails do make your life complicated, don’t we? We follow you around, climb into your lap, breathe in your ear. Even your daughters seduce you, like—what was his name? Old Testament. And even your daughters-in-law. Stop looking glum, dear man; I don’t have a ring in your nose, and never have had.”
“You’ll do it?” He looked relieved.
“Me? Do what?”
“Divorce me.”
“No. Of course not.”
“But you said—”
“I said that I didn’t have a ring in your nose. If you want to divorce me, I won’t fight it. But I’m not the one who wants a divorce. If you like, you can simply do it to me Muslim style. Tell me ‘I divorce you’ three times, and I’ll go pack my clothes.”