In front of other people I call him Luke, but he’ll always be Dutchy to me. He calls me Viv—it sounds a bit like Niamh, he says.
We decide that we’ll live in Hemingford so I can run the store. We’ll rent a small bungalow on a side street several blocks from the Nielsens, four rooms downstairs and one up. As it happens—with, perhaps, a little help from Mr. Nielsen, who may have mentioned something to the superintendent at a Rotary meeting—the Hemingford School is looking for a music teacher. Dutchy also keeps his weekend gig at the Grand in Minneapolis, and I go in with him on Friday and Saturday nights to have dinner and hear him play. On Sundays, now, he plays the organ at Grace Lutheran, replacing the lead-footed organist who was persuaded it was time to retire.
When I told Mrs. Nielsen that Dutchy had asked me to marry him, she frowned. “I thought you said you wanted nothing to do with marriage,” she said. “You’re only twenty. What about your degree?”
“What about it?” I said. “It’s a ring on my finger, not a pair of handcuffs.”
“Most men want their wives to stay home.”
When I related this conversation to Dutchy, he laughed. “Of course you’ll get your degree. Those tax laws are complicated!”
Dutchy and I are about as opposite as two people can be. I am practical and circumspect; he is impulsive and direct. I’m accustomed to getting up before the sun rises; he pulls me back to bed. He has no head at all for math, so in addition to keeping the books at the store, I balance our accounts at home and pay our taxes. Before I met him, I could count on one hand the times I’d had a drink; he likes a cocktail every night, says it relaxes him and will relax me, too. He is handy with a hammer and nail from his experience on the farms, but he often leaves projects half finished—storm windows stacked in a corner while snow rages outside, a leaky faucet disemboweled, its parts all over the floor.
“I can’t believe I found you,” he tells me over and over, and I can’t believe it either. It’s as if a piece of my past has come to life, and with it all the feelings I fought to keep down—my grief at losing so much, at having no one to tell, at keeping so much hidden. Dutchy was there. He knows who I was. I don’t have to pretend.
We lie in bed longer than I am used to on Saturday mornings—the store doesn’t open until ten, and there’s nowhere Dutchy has to be. I make coffee in the kitchen and bring two steaming mugs back to bed, and we spend hours together in the soft early light. I am delirious with longing and the fulfillment of that longing, the desire to touch his warm skin, trace the sinew and muscle just under the surface, pulsing with life. I nestle in his arms, in the nooks of his knees, his body bowed around mine, his breath on my neck, fingers tracing my outline. I have never felt like this—slow-witted and languorous, dreamy, absentminded, forgetful, focused only on each moment as it comes.
When Dutchy lived on the streets, he never felt as alone, he tells me, as he did growing up in Minnesota. In New York the boys were always playing practical jokes on each other and pooling their food and clothes. He misses the press of people, the noise and chaos, black Model Ts rattling along the cobblestones, the treacly smell of street vendors’ peanuts roasting in sugar.
“What about you—do you ever wish you could go back?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Our life was so hard. I don’t have many happy memories of that place.”
He pulls me close, runs his fingers along the soft white underbelly of my forearm. “Were your parents ever happy, do you think?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Pushing the hair back from my face and tracing the line of my jaw with his finger, he says, “With you I’d be happy anywhere.”
Though it’s just the kind of thing he says, I believe that it’s true. And I know, with the newfound clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstance.
ON A MILD AFTERNOON IN EARLY DECEMBER I AM AT THE STORE going over inventory orders with Margaret, the sharp-eyed accounts manager. Packing receipts and forms are all over the floor; I’m trying to decide whether to order more ladies’ trousers than last year, and looking at the popular styles in the catalog as well as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The radio is on low; swing music is playing, and then Margaret holds her hand up and says, “Wait. Did you hear that?” She hurries over to the radio and adjusts the dial.
“Repeat: this is a special report. President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air. The attack of the Japanese has also been made on all naval and military ‘activities’ on the island of Oahu. Casualty numbers are unknown.”
And like that, everything changes.
A few weeks later, Lil comes into the store to see me, her eyes red-rimmed, tears staining her cheeks. “Richard shipped out yesterday, and I don’t even know where he’s going. They just gave him a numbered mailing address that doesn’t tell me anything.” Sobbing into a crumpled white handkerchief, she says, “I thought this stupid war was supposed to be over by now. Why does my fiancé have to go?” When I hug her, she clings to my shoulder.
Wherever you look are posters encouraging sacrifice and support for the war effort. Many items are rationed—meat, cheese, butter, lard, coffee, sugar, silk, nylon, shoes; our entire way of business changes as we work with those flimsy blue booklets. We learn to make change for ration stamps, giving red point tokens as change for red stamps (for meat and butter) and blue point tokens for blue stamps (processed foods). The tokens are made of compressed wood fiber, the size of dimes.
In the store we collect ladies’ lightly used stockings for use in parachutes and ropes, and tin and steel for scrap and metal drives. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” is constantly on the radio. I shift our purchasing to reflect the mood, ordering gift cards and blue onionskin airmail letter forms by the gross, dozens of American flags in all sizes, beef jerky, warm socks, decks of playing cards to go in care packages to ship overseas. Our stock boys shovel driveways and deliver groceries and packages.
Boys from my graduating class are signing up and shipping out, and every week there’s a farewell potluck dinner in a church basement or the lobby of the Roxy or in someone’s home. Judy Smith’s boyfriend, Douglas, is one of the first. The day he turns eighteen he goes down to the recuiter’s office and presents himself for service. Hotheaded Tom Price is next. When I run into him on the street before he leaves, he tells me that there’s no downside—the war’s an open door to travel and adventure, with a good bunch of guys to mess around with and a salary. We don’t talk about the danger—but what I imagine is a cartoon version, bullets flying and each boy a superhero, running, invincible, through a spray of gunfire.
Fully a quarter of the boys from my class volunteer. And when the draft begins, more and more pack up to leave. I feel sorry for the boys with flat feet or severe asthma or partial deafness who I see in the store after their buddies are gone, aimlessly wandering the aisles. They seem lost in their ordinary civilian clothes.
But Dutchy doesn’t join the bandwagon. “Let them come for me,” he says. I don’t want to believe he’ll get called up—after all, Dutchy is a teacher; he’s needed in the classroom. But soon enough it becomes clear that it’s only a matter of time.
THE DAY DUTCHY LEAVES FOR FORT SNELLING IN HENNEPIN County for basic training, I take the claddagh off the chain around my neck and wrap it in a piece of felt. Tucking it in his breast pocket, I tell him, “Now a part of me will be with you.”
“I’ll guard it with my life,” he says.
The letters we exchange are filled with hope and longing and a vague sense of the importance of the mission of the American troops. And the milestones of his training: Dutchy passes his physical and scores high on the mechanical aptitude test. Based on these results he’s inducted into the navy to help replace those lost at Pearl Harbor. Soon enough, he’s on a train to San Diego for technical training.
And when, six weeks after he leaves, I write to tell him that I’m pregnant, Dutchy says that he is over the moon. “The thought of my child growing inside you will keep me going through the roughest days,” he writes. “Just knowing that finally I have a family waiting for me makes me more determined than ever to do my duty and find my way home.”
I am tired all the time and sick to my stomach. I’d like to stay in bed, but I know it’s better to stay busy. Mrs. Nielsen suggests that I move back in with them. She says they’ll take care of me and feed me; they’re worried that I’m getting too thin. But I prefer to be on my own. I’m twenty-two years old now, and I’ve gotten used to living like an adult.
As the weeks pass I am busier than ever, working long days in the store and volunteering in the evenings, running the metal drives and organizing shipments for the Red Cross. But behind everything I do is a low hum of fear. Where is he now, what is he doing?
In the letters I write to Dutchy I try not to dwell on my sickness, the constant queasy feeling that the doctor tells me means the baby is thriving inside me. I tell him instead about the quilt I’m making for the baby, how I cut the pattern out of newspaper and then fine sandpaper, which sticks to the material. I chose a pattern with a woven look at the corners that resembles the weaving of a basket, five strips of fabric around the border. It’s cheerful—yellow and blue and peach and pink calico, with off-white triangles in the middle of each square. The women in Mrs. Murphy’s quilting group—of which I am the youngest member and honorary daughter; they’ve cheered my every milestone—are taking extra care with it, hand sewing in precise small stitches a pattern on top of the design.
Dutchy completes his technical training and aircraft carrier flight deck training, and after he’s been in San Diego for a month, he learns that soon he’ll be shipping out. Given his training and the desperate situation with the Japanese, he figures he’ll be heading to the Central Pacific to assist Allied forces in that region, but nobody knows for sure.
Surprise, skill, and power—this, the navy tells its sailors, is what it will take to win the war.
The Central Pacific. Burma. China. These are only names on a globe. I take one of the world maps we sell in the store, rolled tightly and stored in a vertical container, and spread it on the counter. My finger skims the cities of Yangon, near the coast, and Mandalay, the darker mountainous region farther north. I was prepared for Europe, even its far reaches, Russia or Siberia—but the Central Pacific? It’s so far away—on the other side of the world—that I have a hard time imagining it. I go to the library and stack books on a table: geographical studies, histories of the Far East, travelers’ journals. I learn that Burma is the largest country in Southeast Asia, that it borders India and China and Siam. It’s in the monsoon region; annual rainfall in the coastal areas is about two hundred inches, and the average temperature of those areas is close to ninety degrees. A third of its perimeter is coastline. The writer George Orwell published a novel, Burmese Days, and several essays about life there. What I get from reading them is that Burma is about as far from Minnesota as it’s possible to be.
Over the next few weeks, as one day grinds into the next, life is quiet and tense. I listen to the radio, scour the Tribune, wait anxiously for the mail drop, and devour Dutchy’s letters when they come, scanning quickly for news—is he okay? Eating well, healthy?—and parsing every word for tone and nuance, as if his sentences are a code I can crack. I hold each blue-tinted, tissue-thin letter to my nose and inhale. He, too, held this paper. I run my finger over the words. He formed each one.
Dutchy and his shipmates are waiting for orders. Last-minute flight-deck drills in the dark, the preparations of sea bags, every corner filled and every piece in place, from rations to ammunition. It’s hot in San Diego, but they’re warned that where they’re going will be worse, almost unbearable. “I’ll never get used to the heat,” he writes. “I miss the cool evenings, walking along the street holding your hand. I even miss the damn snow. Never thought I’d say that.” But most of all, he says, he misses me. My red hair in the sun. The freckles on my nose. My hazel eyes. The child growing in my stomach. “You must be getting big,” he says. “I can only imagine the sight.”
Now they’re on the aircraft carrier in Virginia. This is the last note he’ll send before they embark; he’s giving it to a chaplain who came on board to see them off. “The flight deck is 862 feet long,” he writes. “We wear seven different colors, to designate our jobs. As a maintenance technician, my deck jersey, float coat, and helmet are an ugly green, the color of overcooked peas.” I picture him standing on that floating runway, his lovely blond hair hidden under a drab helmet.
Over the next three months I receive several dozen letters, weeks after he writes them, sometimes two in the same day, depending on where they were mailed from. Dutchy tells me about the tedium of life on board—how his best friend from their basic training days, another Minnesotan named Jim Daly, has taught him to play poker, and they spend long hours belowdecks with a revolving cast of servicemen in an endless ongoing game. He talks about his work, how important it is to follow protocol and how heavy and uncomfortable his helmet is, how he’s beginning to get used to the roar of the plane engines as they take off and land. He talks about being seasick, and the heat. He doesn’t mention combat or planes being shot down. I don’t know if he isn’t allowed to or if he doesn’t want to frighten me.
“I love you,” he writes again and again. “I can’t bear to live without you. I’m counting the minutes until I see you.”
The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less clichéd. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.