July
Fort McCoy
Dear Esther,
I am sure you passed your exam, with high marks. I picture Dr. O’Grady in my mind as someone much like my father. I dare say he may have even allowed you to take it had you shown up a year late. I know I would have. I look forward to a celebratory letter, perhaps, when you receive your high marks and entrance into your graduate program.
Your letter contained a strange sentence: “Rosemary sat at the end table, her eyes upon me. I suspect that she took the exam precisely to keep her promise to make me suffer for my crimes against her.” What crimes? I conjured up a few answers of my own, but as I thought them, attempting to be humorous, it occurred to me that you may be serious. I do not understand why someone with your compassionate heart might think they’d committed a crime, but I can only give to you the same words my father delivered to me on the advent of my enlistment. May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue you!
Yes, I do remember, by the way, the Ferris wheel at the Iowa State Fair. Perhaps you were the girl in blond braids with pretty red bows at the end, waving to her parents as she took flight over the midway? I remember standing in the middle of the grounds, the cotton candy dissolving in my mouth, watching her raise her hands above her as the wheel reached its zenith, as if she might fly.
You asked me why we moved. My parents longed for life back with their family, in a city that knew their name, in their own home, their own niche. I am their only child, so of course, I accompanied them. However, I remember the day we pulled from the station in the train, waving to Dorothy, I left a piece of myself—and probably plenty of my youthful blood!—embedded in the soil. I will always belong, most, to the people I left behind.
It is not fair for you to have a mental conjuring of me, and leave me bereft. What do you look like? What will you do for the Fourth of July celebration? I look forward to a day of rest, and perhaps even the sound of the national anthem playing over the loudspeakers. It will be such a day!
Let me know as soon as you receive your marks. I am waiting with great belief in your abilities.
With great affection,
Peter
“With great affection?” Caroline uncrossed her legs, stood up from the bed. “With great affection.” She added a singsong tone. “Great affection!”
“Stop. He’s a lonely GI who’s confused my letters with something more.”
Caroline came over to where Esther stood at the mirror and plopped her chin on her shoulder. “And he wants to know what you look like. What will you tell him?”
“That I am boring and drab, without a face that could launch ships. That it is has been so long since my skin has seen the sun—what with hours cooped up studying, and so in need of a trip to the hairdresser that I fear I have become a jungle girl.” She finished applying her lipstick, glancing at Sadie at play with a paper doll that Caroline and Esther had spent the better part of an hour cutting out clothing for.
“I think I’ll write that part.” Caroline sat down at the table, grabbed the pencil, tucked it into her mouth, as if she might be a gal Friday. “I am fair, for sure, with pale blond hair and red lips, and my friend Caroline believes that if I weren’t so shy, perhaps I might even label myself beautiful—”
“I’m not writing that.”
“Although I am way too stubborn and cross to ever allow myself a romance—”
“Caroline!” Esther glanced at Sadie. “The last thing I need in my life is romance, thank you. How about simply a friendship.”
With great belief in your abilities. She had let those words sink into her, balm her, tear from her the fear even as she endured Rosemary’s cruel smirks.
She should have known that Rosemary wanted to pursue a new life. Because, even if Linus had survived, well, Rosemary had her own future to consider. One outside Linus’s promise, if he’d even made her one. Yet, honestly, if Esther had to choose a nurse to serve with in a trauma, or under the glare of surgical lights, Rosemary would be the first she chose. She could think on her feet, keep a cool head, had great instincts. Rosemary could save lives.
“It’s been nearly two months since you received Linus’s letter. He’s gone, Esther, and you best take a good look at your heart, because I think you’re sweet on Petey.”
“Peter.” Esther drew in a breath, glanced at Caroline, then sat behind Sadie to brush out her hair, catch it into two piglet tails. Sadie made a face at her, and Esther held up her pointer finger, raised an eyebrow. How her daughter managed to knot her hair in an hour baffled her. “I am not sweet on him. I don’t have that luxury.”
“Not as long as Linus’s letter stays unopened. It’s time to say goodbye, Esther.”
Esther tied one of Sadie’s pigtails with a red bow. She’d used blue for the other. “Okay, Sadie, go get your shoes.”
The little girl got up, toddling to the door.
Esther returned to the sofa. “I want to, Caroline. I really do. But I can’t help but feel it’s just another, a final betrayal…”
“Seriously? First you don’t want to open it because you’re afraid that he really loved you. Then you discover that he left a brokenhearted girlfriend behind, that he cheated on, and that no, he probably didn’t love you when he, um, celebrated with you in the back of his Ford—”
“Sadie’s in the room, you know.”
“She’s three.”
“I no tree. Ina two.” Sadie held her red buckle shoes to her chest, balancing them as she held up her hand, tried to form two fingers.
“Of course you are, sweetie,” Caroline said, catching her onto her lap. She picked up one of her shoes, began to fit it on Sadie’s foot. “My point simply is that he’s had a hold on your life too long. You don’t owe him anything beyond what you’ve already given him. Sadie is a beautiful little girl—give me your other foot, honey—the proof that miracles and joy can come out of dark mistakes. But, most of all, you don’t have to live with sackcloth and ashes for the rest of your life. You’re forgiven, if I read my Bible story of Mary Magdalene correctly, so open the letter, say good-bye, and move on.” She kissed Sadie on the top of her head, set her on the floor. “Go give your mama a kiss.”
Sadie ran into her mother’s arms, gave her a sloppy kiss on her cheek. Esther smiled over the top of Sadie’s head at Caroline. “Okay. I’ll do it tonight.”
“Perfect. And then, I want you to go and see him.”
“See who?”
“Him. Petey.”
“I can’t go see him!”
“Sure you can. Take the bus to Fort McCoy. Get off, walk to the army base, and ask for him. I just wish I could be there.”
“I can’t… No. Go see him? I mean—what if…?”
“No one is going to find out. I can watch Sadie for you, and frankly, I see the way you smile when you read his letters. You should meet him. Just see what happens.”
“I don’t know…”
“Let’s see, how did you put it? Oh yeah, ‘I do know that we all gotta believe that there’s something bigger ahead of us. Something better. That God isn’t laughing at the way our lives turned out.’”
Where…?
“You said that to Charlie. On the roof. I was listening. And that’s what made me have the courage to start dating Teddy. Now, guess what—
it’s time for you to believe it too.”
Esther drew in the words, tried to let them nourish her.
“You didn’t come home in a box either, Esther. And that’s not a sin.” Caroline stood, held out her hand for Sadie, picked up a blanket, and draped it over her arm. “Sadie and I are going to go to the Fourth of July parade. The day we celebrate our freedom. Are you coming?”
The main street of Roosevelt heralded the day with patriotic banners hanging from the florist, the appliance store, the barber, the pharmacy, the bank, the auto shop, the dentist, and even the local pub. The entire town seemed gift wrapped for the day.
Children ran with sizzling sparklers along the blocked-off street. At one end the band warmed up, cracking the air with the bangs of a bass drum, the thunder of a tuba. Sadie clapped her hands, bouncing on the curb.
“There’s Teddy,” Caroline said, pointing out a soldier dressed in army greens. Esther waited for the familiar flash of memory, of Linus in his own army greens, but nothing came.
So maybe she should lean into Caroline’s words, embrace them.
And yes, the thought of surprising Peter pushed a smile onto her face. Maybe today he marched in his own parade, in the Fort McCoy celebration. It sounded like he didn’t have leave—but someone needed to guard the prisoners. If she could, she’d save him a piece of cake from the picnic at the community church. Except, well, she couldn’t really go see him.
No.
Really, no.
Three hours later, with Sadie asleep on her lap, she listened to President Truman’s address on the radio speakers in the former Germania hall.
“In this year of 1945, we have pride in the combined might of this nation which has contributed significantly to the defeat of the enemy in Europe.”
Across the room, in her periphery, she watched Arlene Hahn dab a handkerchief to her eyes.
“We have confidence that, under Providence, we soon may crush the enemy in the Pacific.”
What if Linus had been transferred—wasn’t even in Europe? She’d already heard of soldiers being relocated. Sometimes she forgot that the war in the Pacific still raged.
“We have humility for the guidance that has been given us of God in serving His will as a leader of freedom for the world.”
May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue you!
Peter’s words pulsed inside her. She didn’t deserve rescue, not really. And frankly, it simply didn’t seem prudent to put her dreams into the hands of a God who owed her no favors.
Sadie stirred in her arms. Esther leaned over to Caroline, who twined fingers with Teddy. “I’m going to take her home. I’m afraid we’re headed for a long night, between the candy, the sun, and all this excitement.”
Caroline caught her hand, squeezed it. “Open the letter.”
Esther relished the vacant house, the rarity of moments when she could be alone, uncensored with her thoughts. She closed the door and began to climb the stairs, but Sadie awoke on the creak of the fourth step. “I no feel good.”
“I’ll draw you a bath.” She pressed a kiss to her daughter’s sweaty head.
As the tub filled, she brought Sadie to the attic, wrapped her in a towel, then changed into her housecoat.
She tucked Linus’s letter into her pocket then carried Sadie downstairs, adjusted her bath, and let her daughter splash in the lukewarm water.
Sliding onto the closed toilet, she pulled out the letter.
Under her fingers, the brown envelope crinkled, stained with sweat and blood then dried to a crispy shell. She stared at the script—and didn’t mean to compare it to Peter’s, but it seemed wide and loopy, even uneven.
Are you sure?
She turned it over and ran her thumb under the flap.
Opened it.
Out dropped her necklace, the one she’d given him in the car, with the windows fogged, right after she’d given him the secrets of herself.
I need you to remember me.
He’d laughed, twined his fingers into her hair. Sweat pricked his sideburns. “Of course I’ll remember you, Esther. Don’t be silly.”
“No, I…” She’d reached then for her coat, drew it over herself. Somewhere, deep inside, she had the strangest urge to cry. “Take this, please.” She unhooked the chain—the one with her baptism cross on it.
“I can’t wear this into battle.”
“Yes you can. Please. Maybe it’ll keep you safe.”
“Oh, Esther. I’ll be just fine, I promise.” He laughed and let her drop the chain into his palm. “And you take care of yourself too.”
You take care of yourself too.
She’d gone the next day to see him off at the station, but he’d already boarded the train.
The necklace lay in a tangled ball in the well of her hand.
She tucked it into her pocket.
“Look at me, Mama!” Sadie lay on her stomach, put her face into the water, blew bubbles.
She tugged out the letter and opened it.
Dear Esther,
If you are reading this, then I have not kept my promise, and your hopes for my safe return are not to be.
She took a breath, the blade through her heart so swift it pricked tears into her eyes. Blinked them away. Didn’t she know this already?
But yes, it felt final.
Not to be…
There’s no way to talk about this without hurting your feelings. And perhaps you don’t want to know, but I have been unable to escape the hold that the last night in Atlantic City has on me. The guilt has dug fingers into my soul, and if I hope to enter heaven I must try and wrestle free of it.
Esther, I am sorry you wasted your wedding night on me.
I was pledged to someone else, perhaps not formally, but in my heart, and I dishonored two people that night. Of course, at the time I gave no thought to the consequences, and in that I know I was young and stupid. There are consequences, and I am sorry that you have had to bear them alone. I know that sending you to my parents’ home was probably cowardly at best, but I didn’t know what else to do. I fear I only made the situation worse.
I have to be brutally frank. I feel nothing for Sadie. I don’t mean this to be cruel, but I want to free you from guilt or any obligations you may feel to my family.
I have no idea what I might say to my parents, and I have to confess that in my heart I am a coward in that sense. I wish we could erase the moment in the back of the Ford. To put it in a box and bury it, as if it never happened.
I hope with this letter, you can.
Sincerely,
Linus
She stopped at the Catholic church first. Or, probably, she’d term it as last, because entering Sacred Heart, breathing in the sweet, incensed air, redolent with age and so much desperation, her visit seemed more of a eulogy. Good-bye, Linus. Along the altar, hundreds of candles in blood-red glass holders flickered their petitions toward heaven.
She knew no one here. And perhaps God might not notice, either, her slink to the altar.
“Sadie, wait for Mommy in the pew, and don’t move.”
She went to the front, picked up a long match, and lit a candle for Linus.
Put that night in a box and bury it. How did she begin to collect the fragments of that night? To package the forbidden pleasures, the longing that, for that brief hour, he’d healed. How to capture the hollow places that only seemed to echo louder the more she realized what she’d betrayed. Who she’d betrayed.
Put that night in a box and bury it.
In truth, his letter gave her a way to begin. It allowed her to confess their foolishness—not just hers, but for the first time allowed her to put the mantle upon his shoulders too. Now, how to forgive herself—forgive him—and forget?
She crossed herself and knelt before the altar.
She expected perhaps a rush of penitence, perhaps shame to lay her prostrate. Instead, just a wound, finally scarring over, followed by a dull throb deep inside.
I’m sorry. I’m…
Esther, do you love me?
The question pulsed in her head, like it might be her own thoughts, except, well, perhaps they were.
She opened her eyes. The church, with the crimson carpet leading to the altar, the high stained glass windows melting the daylight over the pews. Sadie sat on her knees on the pew, trotting Peter Rabbit across the polished back.
Esther turned back to the figure of Christ, twisted on the cross, an ornament in the front of the altar.
Yes. Yes, Lord. I want to…
She pushed herself up from the rail.
“Are you all right, child?”
The priest stood behind her, dressed in the solemn visage of his calling. She stopped, looked up at him as she held out her hand for Sadie. “Yes, Father, I—I think I am.” At least part of her might be.
“You’re not staying for Saturday morning mass?”
She hustled past him.
Outside, the day bolstered her—fresh and clear and smelling of freedom. She walked under the attention of the golden sun, swinging Sadie’s hand then breaking out in a skip together.
Thank you, Linus.
Caroline met her at the door, wearing jeans and a white blouse tied at the waist. “Ready to play with Aunt Caroline?” she said as she knelt before Sadie. Sadie popped a kiss on her nose.
“Are you sure?”
“What, sure that you should meet him? Absolutely. Sure I want to spend the day with the princess here? Again, absolutely. Sure that I want to go with you?” She grinned at her. “Absolutely.”
Esther kissed her on the cheek. “I need to catch the bus.”
“Yes, you do.”
Esther had taken the train from New Jersey three months pregnant with Sadie, crammed close to other army or navy wives, most of them with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces, many with rounded bellies. She’d wanted to cry too, but couldn’t bear to allow tears for herself.
Now, again, as she sat on the bus, third seat from the front, dressed in her church dress—the light blue one with the tiny daisies and cuffed sleeves, the one that brought out her eyes—she fought the strangest urge to cry, again. Her insides climbed over one another, and her hands slicked against her vinyl pocketbook.
What if he… Oh, she should get off this bus this moment, hike back to Roosevelt where she’d discarded her sanity.
“Are you going to visit your soldier?”
She turned to the voice, an elderly woman across the row, her knitting needles clicking as she looked at Esther. She reminded her of Mrs. Hahn, with rounder edges perhaps, in a brown cotton dress, matching sensible shoes. She wore a blue hat, fraying at the brim, as if it had made this trip a few times. “You sure do look pretty.”
“I—um—yes, I guess I am.” Esther turned back to the window, watched the ground as it pitched and rolled across the horizon, as if God had simply laid grass over the ocean. Creeks and rivers ran in the rivulets between sandstone cliffs, and oak and pine scrubbed the horizon against a sapphire sky.
I was pledged to someone else, perhaps not formally, but in my heart, and I dishonored two people that night.
She didn’t know why those, of Linus’s words, kept returning to her. When she read them, she’d simply brushed over them, like a hand over a flame, the other elements of his letter so much sharper. The other wounds she’d endured, accepted. But this wound seemed more tenacious, even unexpected. It bubbled up under her skin like a blister, festering. Not enough to warrant true pain, but a stinging perhaps, as she’d realized that he came to her, his heart already reserved for another.
Linus had loved Rosemary. And while he’d given Esther a piece of himself—probably one that he didn’t share with Rosemary—he had wanted to give Rosemary his future.
His children.
Yes, Sadie should have been Rosemary’s child.
More, what did that feel like, to be truly loved by handsome, dancing, brash Linus? The one who could turn her to sweet syrup with a look across the dance floor, make the music stop, call her beautiful with a smile?
What if that smile could have been for her, alone?
She closed her eyes. Put it in a box. In the ground.
The bus turned west and in the distance she could make out tall towers—like guard towers—and cyclone fencing around the perimeter at the far end of the camp.
“Every time I come here, it makes me want to cry for our boys overseas, the ones in camps like this in Germany.”
“Like this?”
“POW camps. The entire north side of Fort McCoy is a prisoner of war camp—a few Japs, but mostly Germans.”
She had seen the pictures of POWs from the newsreels at the cinema—emaciated soldiers being liberated from concentration camps, their bones protruding like clubs from their bodies. Surely America took better care of its prisoners.
If I saw a Nazi, I’d spit on him where he stood.
The bus stopped at the end of a dirt road, at the Fort McCoy sign. The woman next to her gathered her bags, backed out of her seat.
Esther waited for her to pass. She relieved her of one of her bags once they disembarked. “Who are you visiting?”
“My son, Carl. I brought him a fresh kuchen. I come up every Saturday from Madison.”
“It’s nice the army stationed him so close to home.”
The woman looked her over, gave her a slight frown.
They stopped at the front gate, gave their names, and the guard ushered them into a visitors’ room. The woman gave her son’s name and then exited out the side door to a picnic table.
“Name?”
The soldier at the desk looked up, raised an eyebrow.
“Peter Hess. He’s a medic.” Esther smiled, glanced again at the picnic tables outside. The woman had taken out the kuchen, wrapped in cloth, and set it in front of her. Esther’s stomach had begun to knot—maybe she should have brought something.
The guard nodded and gestured to the picnic area. She passed through the doors, outside, and noted the barbed wire fencing in the area.
She sat down at the table. “I feel like I’m in a prison.”
The woman glanced at her. “Of course you do.”
Esther knitted her fingers together, placed them on the table, took a breath, and tried to remember how Peter had described himself. Errol Flynn. She’d seen the movie Robin Hood, yes, and Errol Flynn, with his sandy blond hair and square jaw, could be considered handsome, perhaps. She’d forgotten to ask Peter his rank—probably lieutenant, but she supposed, as a doctor, he would possibly be a captain.
Oh, what was she doing here? She should just get up and run, and…
The gate squealed open. A scarecrow of a boy, probably no more than nineteen, with a half-beard and a thatch of haymow hair, wearing green pants and a work shirt, entered the gated area. His mother found her feet, grasped his hands. “Carl!”
Esther stared at his outfit, blood pooling in her feet. She braced her hands on the table. No. It couldn’t… The boy wore a large P painted on one leg, a W on the other. And on his arm, a band. PW.
Prisoner of War.
Oh. No. She turned, untangling herself from the bench—
“It’s…you.”
Flattened Midwestern tones. A tone of surprise that caught her heart. She froze, swallowed.
Turned.
If she’d had time to conjure up her visions of a POW, she may have expected an emaciated man, the sort found in the reels from Europe, with sunken, battled eyes, defeat in his voice, his bones like knobs in his puppet body.
Not this man. Tall, with wide, ropy shoulders, he had the ruddy strength of a farm boy, tanned, with dark blond hair streaked by the July sun. And his eyes—blue, so blue that she might have been seeing the ocean for the tumult in it, the way it tugged at her, hungry. He wore the same outfit as the boy—green army pants, the work shirt, the emblems of war on his legs and arms. But he’d rolled up his sleeves, revealing tanned forearms, and she recalled his words, Another man inside of me could have been a farmer. His hands, however, the long, lean fingers that reached out to her, were that of a surgeon.
No. “Peter Hess?”
He nodded, a smile on his face that bespoke disbelief—a sweet disbelief perhaps, because his blue eyes glistened. “Yes. I am… Peter.” His voice ruckled out of him, as if he’d had to pry it from somewhere deep inside. “You—you came to see me.”
And then he wiped his cheek, and she knew.
“Oh no.” She got up, backed away, her hands around her waist. “No, I didn’t…”
“Esther?”
She shook her head.
“Please—Esther—”
But she banged through the doors—“Esther!”—and through the visitor’s room, out into the hot glaring sun, now burning heat down the back of her soggy dress.
She held in her hiccupping breath, the edge of tears, all the way down to the end of the driveway. She didn’t look back once, not at the webbing of fence or at the voice that called after her, again, then again.
No, she stumbled until she found the shadow of the sign for Camp Fort McCoy, sat down in the feeble shade…and wept.