WHILE
WE’RE
FAR
APART
LYNN AUSTIN
To my mom, Virginia,
a WWII nurse who saved all of her scrapbooks for me.
To my dad, Paul,
who served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during WWII.
And to Yaacov and Miriam,
who survived the holocaust in Hungary
and became part of our family.
Thank you for your legacy of courage and faith.
May the Lord keep watch between you and
me when we are away from each other.
Genesis 31:49 NIV
Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Books by Lynn Austin
CHAPTER 1
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER 1943
ESTHER’S FATHER HALTED the lazy swaying of the porch swing. “Listen,” he said. “There’s something I need to tell all of you.” The darkness in his voice made Esther’s skin prickle. He had used the same phrase, the same tone, when he’d told her that Mama had gone to live up in heaven.
“I’ve been thinking . . .” He paused, kneading his forehead as if his head hurt. He looked so sad. Esther wished she knew how to make him smile again.
They had walked to Grandma Shaffer’s house for lunch after church, and Daddy had barely spoken all afternoon. But that wasn’t unusual. Grandma had filled the long silences with news about Uncle Steve, who was fighting the Japanese, and Uncle Joe, who was being shipped off to North Africa soon. Grandma’s next-door neighbor, Penny Goodrich, had come over to sit on the porch, too, and they had all watched Esther’s brother, Peter, chase Grandma’s dog around the backyard. It had been such a pleasant afternoon – until now.
Daddy cleared his throat. “I’ve . . . um . . . I’ve made a decision.”
He paused once again, and the air went still as if the breeze had hushed to listen. Woofer finally stopped barking, and even the traffic on Brooklyn Boulevard a few blocks away seemed to have halted.
“What is it, Eddie?” Grandma asked. “You look so serious. You feeling all right?”
“I’m going to enlist, Ma.”
“What?”
“I said, I’m going to enlist in the army.” He spoke louder this time because Grandma was hard of hearing, but Esther could tell that she had heard him plain enough the first time.
Esther hugged her skinny arms to her chest, feeling a chill. At age twelve, she was old enough to know exactly what “enlist” meant. She listened to the news reports about the war on the radio every night. She watched the newsreels at Loew’s Brooklyn Theater before the Saturday matinee started. Oh yes. She knew it meant that her daddy would go far away like her two uncles had – and that he might never come back. The afternoon felt ten degrees colder, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud.
“Saints above, Eddie!” Grandma shouted. “Are you out of your mind? You can’t enlist! You have two children to think about. Who’s going to take care of them?”
“Well . . . that’s what we need to talk about. I was hoping you would. You said if I ever needed anything . . .”
“Are you crazy? What in the world are you thinking? . . . How on earth . . . ?”
“The war can’t last forever. I’ll be back.”
Grandma gave his shoulder a shove. “And what if you don’t come back? Huh? What then? What if you end up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean like Millie Barker’s son? Then what? You want these poor children to be orphans?”
Esther understood the finality of death. She knew she would never see Mama again until she died and went to heaven herself. She also knew that lots of men were being killed in the war. Grandma had hung a little flag in her window with two stars on it, one for Uncle Joe and one for Uncle Steve, and she had explained to Esther why Mrs. Barker across the street now had a flag in her window with a gold star.
Esther wanted to cry and beg Daddy not to go, but she didn’t want to make him angry. The love they shared felt as fragile as spider webs, and Esther was never quite certain that she had his attention, let alone his affection. Sometimes it seemed as though Daddy wasn’t home even when he was. She decided to let Grandma argue with him.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Ma. I’ll be in the army, on land.”
“You don’t think soldiers are dying in the army, too? On land?”
“Listen, I was hoping Esther and Peter could live here with you until I get back.”
Grandma stared at Daddy with her mouth open as if she was about to take a bite out of something. Esther tried to imagine living here, and it made her stomach hurt. Grandma had so many rules like “don’t leave the door open or the dog will get out,” and “don’t bother my parakeet,” and “don’t make noise because it will disturb the next-door neighbors,” and “don’t touch my stuff” – which lay heaped in piles everywhere. Esther didn’t mind visiting on Sunday, but by the time she and Daddy and Peter boarded the crosstown bus for home, she always felt as though she had been holding her breath for three hours.
“How can they live here?” Grandma asked Daddy. “What about school? Did you consider that? They would have to change to a different school if they lived with me. Besides, there’s no room for them in this house.”
“What do you mean there’s no room? You and Pop raised three boys here.” But Esther had always wondered how Daddy and her uncles had ever fit. Grandma kept things that most people threw into the trash – piles and piles of things that made it hard to move around from room to room.
“That was years ago, Eddie. Your bunk beds are long gone, and I’m using that room for my own things now. I wouldn’t know where to begin to clear everything out. And what would I do with it all?”
“You could always move into our apartment.”
“What about my dog, huh? And my bird? They don’t allow pets where you live. Besides, your apartment has too many stairs to climb.”
“Ma, listen – ”
“No, you listen. I love Peter and Esther, you know I do. . . .” Grandma tossed the comment in Esther’s direction like a foul ball at a baseball game. It sounded great when it smacked against the bat, but in the end, it didn’t count for anything.
“But saints above, Eddie, I’m too old to raise
children! Helping with homework and worrying about measles and chicken pox . . . It’s too much! They would be too much for me to handle all day and all night. Let somebody else fight the Nazis. You’re thirty-three years old, for heaven’s sake. You have responsibilities here at home.”
Esther looked up at Daddy to see if Grandma’s arguments had convinced him, but the expression she saw on his face sent another chill through her. His lips had turned white and he seemed to be holding his breath. Grandma must have noticed it, too. “What? What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“It’s too late. I already enlisted.”
“You – what!” Grandma exploded like a shaken soda bottle, reaching out to cuff Daddy’s ear as if he were a little boy. “Why would you do such a stupid thing? Of all the irresponsible . . . idiotic . . .”
“Listen to me, Ma. I can’t go on the way I have been. I just can’t.” His voice sounded as cold and frosty as a metal ice cube tray, straight out of the freezer. “There are too many reminders of her. Too many things that will never be the same. Rachel is everywhere in that apartment – and yet she isn’t.”
“Then get another apartment, for crying out loud. You don’t have to go off and fight a war if you need a change. Start all over again someplace else. New York is a big city, you know. Brooklyn has plenty of other apartments for rent. Your children need you.”
Daddy rubbed his ear where Grandma had cuffed him. “I’m no use to them, Ma. I’m not even a good father, let alone a good mother.”
Esther tried to speak, but her chest hurt the way it had after she fell off the monkey bars at school. She couldn’t draw a breath. She wanted to tell him he was a good father. He fixed their meals and listened to ball games on the radio with them at night. He packed their lunch boxes for school every day and helped them study for spelling tests and took them to church on Sunday. The house did seem much too quiet, and he never sang or played the piano the way Mama used to do. And he didn’t tell bedtime stories about people in the Bible, either. They ate a lot of canned soup instead of meat and potatoes, but that didn’t matter to Esther. She just wanted Daddy to stay with them in their own apartment, not go away to war and leave them with Grandma.
She put her hand on his arm as she searched for something to say, but when he turned to her and she saw tears in his eyes, she couldn’t speak. What if she said the wrong thing and he started crying during the night like he did right after Mama died? Esther remembered the terrible, helpless feeling it gave her to hear her father weeping, especially when she couldn’t stop crying herself and there was no one in the whole world to comfort either one of them. Daddy had done his best to console her, but his embraces felt brief and stiff as if he was afraid Esther would break if he hugged her too hard. He was tall and lean, and his callused hands were stained with grease from repairing cars all day. Mama had been soft and warm, and she would hold Esther in her arms for a long, long time.
“Don’t do it, Eddie. Please,” Grandma begged. “Think of your children. Go down there tomorrow and tell the army you changed your mind.”
“I can’t. It’s too late.” He spoke so softly that Esther thought she might have imagined it. For sure Grandma hadn’t heard him. But then he cleared his throat and said in a louder voice, “I already resigned from my job. I leave for basic training in two weeks.”
His words gave Esther the same empty, floating feeling she’d had after Mama died, as if she were a fluff of dandelion, no longer tethered to the earth. What was going to happen to her? How would she keep from sailing away on the slightest breath of wind?
“Saints above, Eddie! Two weeks? How could you do such a stupid thing?”
Peter must have heard Grandma yelling because he stopped running around the backyard with Woofer and hurried over to the porch. He was three years younger than Esther and as thin as a stick figure – not at all like most rough-and-tumble boys his age. His hair was the same shiny auburn color that Mama’s had been. Esther could always look at Peter when she needed to remember. He stumbled up the porch steps, his cheeks flushed, his hair sweaty, and looked from one of them to the next. “What happened?”
Daddy didn’t seem to hear him. “I have to do this, Ma. Don’t you see?”
“No. I most certainly do not. How can you do this to your children? After everything they’ve been through? Are you crazy?”
“No . . . but I might go crazy if I stay here much longer.”
“I have nothing more to say to you.” Grandma struggled out of her rocking chair and stormed into the house, slamming the screen door – something she yelled at Esther and Peter for doing. The chair continued to rock after she abandoned it, and Esther reached across Daddy’s lap to make it stop. Mrs. Mendel from the apartment downstairs used to say it was bad luck for a chair to rock with nobody in it – and they didn’t need any more bad luck, that’s for sure. Again, an eerie silence settled over the backyard. Then Penny Goodrich, Grandma’s next-door neighbor, broke the silence.
“Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll watch them for you.”
Esther had forgotten that Penny was even there. Everyone had forgotten her. But that’s the way Penny was – so quiet and unimportant that you could look right at her and never see her. Esther had no idea why Penny always showed up at Grandma’s house on Sunday afternoons when they came to visit. She was just one of those nosy neighbors with no life of her own, who watched other people’s lives as if watching a movie.
Penny was younger than Daddy but looked like she was old enough to get married. Daddy said that she had lived with her parents on the other half of Grandma’s duplex since he was a boy and Penny was a baby. Mr. and Mrs. Goodrich must have been very old when Penny was born – like Sarah and Abraham in the Bible – because they were ancient now, even older than Grandma was. They hardly ever came outside to sit on their back porch, and they never used their half of the tiny backyard. Daddy said he used to tease Penny a lot when they were kids because she was such a little pest. Now he turned to look at her as if he, too, had forgotten she was there.
“What did you say, Penny?”
“I’ll take care of your kids for you. I mean, I wish you weren’t going off to war because it’s so dangerous and everything, but I could move into your apartment with them so they wouldn’t have to change schools.” Daddy stared at her in surprise, but he didn’t reply. “I know I’ve never been a real mother or anything,” Penny continued, “but I can cook and take care of a house and everything.”
“What about your job? Where do you work again?”
“I sell tickets over at the bus station.” She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “But you could help me figure out how to get there from your apartment every day, couldn’t you? Which bus to take?”
“Don’t your parents need you here?”
“Oh, they can manage without me,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Mother always says how much I get on her nerves. Besides, I could check on them after work and on the weekends. They’d be okay.” Esther saw the direction this conversation was going, and she didn’t like it at all. She had to speak up and put a stop to the idea before she ended up with Daddy far away and Penny Goodrich living in their apartment. Penny was nice enough, always bringing candy and gum and things for her and Peter, but something about her annoyed Esther. She felt in her pocket for the red- and white-striped peppermint that Penny had given her today. Esther had told her, “No, thank you,” but Penny had pushed the candy into her hand anyway, saying, “Oh, go on and have one. Your father won’t mind.”
Grandma said that whenever she tried to give something back to Penny in order to even the score, Penny would do twice as much for her the next time. “If you told her you liked her shoes,” Grandma once said, “Penny would take them right off, then and there, and shove them into your hands and not take no for an answer.” Esther would never want Penny’s clothes. She dressed like an old woman in baggy housedresses and patterned aprons and thick-soled shoes.
“I could still pick up groceries for my folks every week,” Penny was saying, “and do their washing and everything while I’m here – and your kids could visit their grandma.”
“That sounds like a lot of work for you,” Daddy said.
“Oh, it’s okay, I don’t mind. I get real lonely sometimes, you know? It would be nice to do something different for a change.”
“I just don’t understand why Ma won’t help me.”
“Maybe it’s because your brothers are already fighting and you’re all she has left. She’s probably afraid of losing all three of you, and I don’t blame her, do you?”
“I probably won’t even get to fight. The army needs mechanics to keep their jeeps running. They might teach me how to fix tanks, they said. I’d like to try airplane engines, too.”
“That would be nice. And you’d be safe, right?”
“It’s just that I need to get away, Penny. There are too many reminders around here and . . . and I just can’t take it anymore. Why can’t Ma understand that?”
“Poor Eddie. I understand. It must be so hard for you.” Penny laid her hand on top of his. He looked down at it in surprise, then up at her. She reminded Esther of Grandma’s cocker spaniel with her wide, sad eyes and her head tilted to one side.
“You would really do it?” Daddy asked. “You’d move in and take care of the kids for me while I’m away?”
“Of course I would. I’d love to help you.”
Esther watched him consider the idea. She wanted to elbow Daddy in the ribs and say, Hey! What about me? Why aren’t you asking what I think? But something heavy pushed down on her chest again, making it hard to breathe. “Daddy?” she said softly.
“You probably wouldn’t need to live there for very long,” he continued. “I’m sure Ma will change her mind and let the kids move in with her once she gets used to the idea.”
“Daddy?” Esther spoke louder this time.
“And I know you’d still help Ma out anytime she needed it, wouldn’t you? Like if she needed a break?”
“Of course. We’ll manage just fine. You’ll see.”
Panic squeezed Esther’s ribs. This arrangement was really going to happen, and she didn’t know how to stop it. She didn’t want Daddy to go away – and she certainly didn’t want boring Penny Goodrich to move in with them and take Mama’s place. “Daddy!”