The bomber jacket, p.20
The Bomber Jacket, page 20
She may as well stay home and help out on the farm. After all, it was Gretchen who had won the scholarship. Between her savings and her part-time job as a waitress, she paid for her room and board. As for the trip abroad, she was using Grandpa Dunst’s small legacy, a bit of cash left to her, Naomi, and William, available to them when they graduated from high school. It wasn’t her fault that Naomi was too stingy to do anything but save it for a rainy day. Bad times were over. And it was about to be a new decade. Time for new things. Even sixteen-year-old William talked college.
But feeling guilty at her good fortune, said, “Naomi, I’m… sorry.”
“Sorry for what? What did you do?” Naomi’s tone was accusatory.
“Nothing at all.”
“I can’t believe Mother and Daddy are letting you go. There’s going to be a war. Why would you go where there’s going to be a war? If I were Mother and Daddy, I’d…”
“But you aren’t, are you? And, anyway, there won’t be a war. At least none that will involve us.” Gretchen took another sip of her iced tea.
“Maybe not us, but Britain’s sure to be drawn in, and you’ll be in England.”
“I’ll be in Scotland. Fiona said Scotland is at the top of England and not to worry. She says England won’t go to war. Besides, they’re an island.”
“Then she’s as much of a stupid girl as you are. They just called up their reserves for special training. They’re getting ready for a war.”
Gretchen took in Naomi’s crossed arms and sour frown.
“How do you know, Naomi?”
“I read the papers. I listen to the wireless. I hear Daddy talking to the hired hand.”
“Since when do you care about world affairs? You’re always up to your elbows in flour.”
Naomi made a gravelly sound in her throat but said nothing more.
They sat, an uneasy silence settling. Gretchen was mentally finishing her packing when Naomi said in a more civil tone, “I thought maybe Henry might come. Say goodbye and all. He wasn't at your graduation last week. I was surprised.”
Gretchen felt her face grow warm but didn't look at her sister.
“He won't be coming,” She tried to sound nonchalant.
“And why not?”
She had worked very hard to forget that night, to erase the anguish in Henry’s clear blue eyes, so transparent she thought she knew him to the core. But she was completely mistaken.
“We had words.” Gretchen tried to make her voice light, indifferent.
“Words?” There was her sister’s censure.
“At dinner the Saturday before my graduation.”
“Yes, you had mentioned in a letter that he invited you to some very... what did you call it... swanky place.”
"It was very swanky." Gretchen tossed her head. “You wouldn’t have liked it. He ordered champagne.”
“Champagne?” Naomi echoed with a tinge of longing.
Some devil in Gretchen made her sneer, “Ever have champagne, NayNay?” using the long-discarded, babyish endearment.
“Of course not. Don't be ridiculous. When would I ever have champagne? I don't get to go out to nightclubs and such. Someone has to stay and do the work.”
Gretchen refused to rise to Naomi’s needling. She was always scolding, always putting a damper on any innocent fun she and Henry had: swinging into the pond on a rope, jumping in the hayloft, hitting the tennis ball against the barn, dancing to 33s on the gramophone. There was always some critical remark, some comment to their mother about how spoiled Gretchen was.
“Did you tell Henry you're sorry?”
Gretchen started, flushing. Had Naomi guessed about that awful night? Henry wouldn't have told Naomi, would he? No, he hadn't seen her, and besides, I know Henry. He would never tell anyone what happened.
“Sorry for what?” Gretchen shot back, trying not to sound defensive.
“Well, knowing you, Gretchen, I'm sure it was your fault that you had words.”
Losing her battle to rein in her fury at Naomi's know-it-all tone, her voice began trembling. "It was not my fault. He's the one who made a fool of himself. Whatever put it in his mind? I just wanted to cry. He ruined it. Ruined the evening.”
Gretchen's eyes filled with tears, remembering the excruciating shock of Henry's proposal and the pain on his face when she turned on him in anger. How callous she had been, how heartless. Uncalled for behavior. But he had taken her completely by surprise. Marry him? What could he have been thinking? All these years, he had been like a brother. She never imagined even wanting to kiss him. What had put it in his mind?
Yet as she spoke, Gretchen realized there had been plenty of signs indicating how Henry felt. If she had wanted to see them. She looked up into Naomi's intense stare.
"I can't imagine Henry ever making a fool of himself. He's a very mature young man. Hard working. If he was foolish, it was to order champagne and take you out to the nicest restaurant in Harrisburg..." A pause stretched. "How did he make a fool of himself?”
Gretchen looked away, assuming an innocent air.
There was growing venom in Naomi’s voice. “He didn't... he couldn't have...”
“Yes, he did,” Gretchen spat. "There I was, all excited to tell him about my trip to Scotland, and all he can say is, 'What about our house in New Cumberland?'"
“He asked you to marry him?” Naomi's voice shook.
“Hardly. It wasn't even a proper proposal. I don't even think he had a ring. It was all so queer. So odd. I can't imagine whatever got into him.”
“He asked you to marry him?” Naomi seemed unable to comprehend. “He asked you to marry him?”
“Well, he didn't ask, really. He sort of told me. Or assumed. I don't know what it was. I didn't stay to find out.”
“What do you mean you didn't stay?” Naomi’s shrillness made Gretchen cringe.
“I was shocked. I never expected it. He completely caught me by surprise. I couldn't think of what to do. I got up and left.”
Gretchen winced at the words. Is that what I did? Just left him there in the restaurant? Gretchen, you are heartless.
Naomi had gone ashen, but her brown eyes were wide and threatening. Gretchen was astonished. She had never seen such a look on her sister’s face.
“You... left... him... sitting... there,” Naomi said each word like a slap.
Gretchen instinctively pulled back, curling up in the corner of the swing, clutching the glass of iced tea in front of her.
Then she knew. Then she understood why all those times when Henry came from Carlisle for Sunday dinner while Gretchen was still in high school, Naomi would tell their mother that she would cook, and do the whole meal, not just the desserts she usually made.
"I'll give you a day off," she'd explain to their grateful mother, and each Sunday that Henry was expected, Naomi made a wonderful dinner and baked fabulous pies and cakes, set the table with Grandma Dunst's willow ware china and cut glass, and put out starched napkins. She was showing off her domestic skills. Trying to impress Henry.
How did she miss it? Naomi was in love with him. And Henry is in love with me.
Gretchen didn't realize she had said the words aloud until she felt the sting of an open hand across her cheek.
“You led him on. You must have. Flirted. Played with him. Why else would he have proposed to a chit of a girl like you? You're not even a woman. Just a girl who looks like one.”
The shock of Naomi's slap wore off suddenly. Gretchen stood up, glaring at her sister. “I don't want him. He's not my type. You can have him. If you can get him!”
Naomi leaped to her feet. Several inches shorter, she scowled up at Gretchen, then tore the glass of iced tea out of Gretchen's hands, tossing the contents in her face.
Ignoring her sister’s gasp of shock, Naomi snarled, “I hope you die of love someday. Die of it! Love somebody who thinks you’re worthless. It would serve you right!”
Slamming the tumbler on the floor, shattering glass and scattering ice, Naomi flung the screen door against the wall as she ran into the house. Gretchen could hear her feet pounding up the stairs and the slam of a distant bedroom door.
“Girls, girls, what’s going on?” her mother’s alarmed voice drifted out to the porch.
Gretchen stood unmoving, her face and dress drenched with sticky wetness as she watched the late afternoon sunlight turn the broken glass shards into prisms that projected tiny rainbows on the wall behind the swing.
fourteen
September 1939
Shouts from the lower regions of the boarding house woke Henry from a fitful sleep. Lying on the lumpy mattress, he stared at the cracked, plaster ceiling of his small, third-floor bedroom. The smell of Sunday supper drifted up the stairs and crept under the door. Must be near five-thirty.
He came home from work Thursday achy and feverish and went right to bed. His landlady sent up toast, tea, and soup, which he had nibbled between restless bouts of sleep and nightmarish dreams. He declined her offer to fetch the doctor.
Though finally well enough to get up, what was there to fill the long and empty evening ahead?
Henry had kept to himself in the three months since Gretchen cruelly thrust his proposal aside as if insulted by it. Now he was grateful he had moved into a more expensive single room; he couldn’t have handled the prodding questions from a nosy roommate.
Not that he ever told the other fellows about Gretchen, let alone his plans to propose. All those Saturday nights when he went out the door, dressed up, they’d razz him, “Where ya goin’ Schmidt? Got a girl? Hey, take me along. I’ll spot you a brew.”
He would just smile and say, “Just going out.”
“Betcha got secrets, Henry,” Marcus Shute always said, but Henry ignored him. To prevent more prodding, he had continued his habit of leaving the boarding house dressed up two Saturday nights a month. But not for a trip to Harrisburg. Or to see Gretchen.
She was gone. Very far away.
Scotland.
Sometimes he'd just go for a drive, park the car on some back road, and sit, staring at the fields, thinking about those years on his uncle's farm. Or go to a bar where he wasn’t known. One weekend a month, he continued to visit his parents in Lancaster, just as he had always done since moving away at eighteen.
More shouts from downstairs caught his attention.
Might as well get up and investigate the kerfuffle. Certainly would beat another long night reading a Tarzan novel, going to the cinema alone, or sitting in a smoky, noisy, bar nursing the one beer he never finished, trying to forget her last touch.
Involuntarily, he put his fingertips to his right cheek, feeling the fiery trace of her nails beneath the stubble of his unshaven face and hearing once more her pitying goodbye, “Oh, dear Henry. I had no idea.”
Even now, the tone of her voice made him cringe.
With a half-moan that harmonized with the creaking metal springs, he rolled off the narrow bed. First order of business, a bath and a shave, followed by a splash of Old Spice, Gretchen’s gift last year at Christmas. He could never shave without thinking about her and had considered pouring it down the drain but never could bring himself to do it.
Thirty minutes later, dressed in tan serge pants and a short-sleeved blue cotton shirt with a button-down collar, he locked his door and ambled down the once-grand mahogany staircase carpeted in a threadbare, faded floral print. In the sitting room, a dozen men of various ages were talking in excited voices.
A thin, wiry young man rushed over to Henry, “It’s war. The Brits have gone to war! I knew it. I knew it!”
The words were a punch in his gut. “Are you sure, Marcus?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the young man insisted.
“You didn’t know it, you damn idiot,” Frank, a newer boarder shot back at Marcus. “You said they’d never go to war.”
“I’ll have none of that cursing in my boarding house, Mr. O’Reilly!” Mrs. Landis, the landlady protested, her round face turning redder than usual. “Surely you can express yourself in ways that don’t require taking the Lord’s name in vain. And no unruly behavior from you, either, Mr. Shute.”
“But I didn’t even mention the Lord’s name, ma’am,” Frank replied in a chastised voice, while Marcus just shrugged.
“Nevertheless, it was implied,” Mrs. Landis insisted, sitting up taller in the cracked, leather wingback chair beside the tile-lined fireplace. This was the throne from which she reigned during the evening gatherings, seated next to the waist-high, elegant, dark wood Zenith radio that was her consort. Nearly all of the other boarders were gathered nearby, seated on worn couches and ottomans or leaning against the faded pink Victorian wallpaper.
When Henry had arrived in September, the rotund landlady informed him, “We have conversations in the evenings in the drawing room. We discuss the day’s events and what everyone has done to contribute to the good of the country. Of course, we listen to the wireless. Won’t have dinnertime disturbed, however. This is a civilized boarding home.”
She turned toward Henry, concern on her face. “Mr. Schmidt, are you feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you, ma’am, much better,” Henry replied, his mind on a distant land. But she’d be safe in Scotland, surely. A long way from Germany. “And thank you for the soup and tea and such you sent up,” he said as an afterthought.
“But you’ve missed supper. Don’t think Mable’s cleaned up yet. We all rushed in here to catch the six o’clock news.”
“I’m fine, ma’am. I’m not a bit hungry. But thank you.”
Henry knew things had been looking grim in Europe, though since June, he had tried to ignore the newspapers and avoid the drawing room conversations. When he wasn’t working all the overtime he was allowed, he took endless, rambling walks through town, inhabiting his memories rather than his current life.
Though a private person, he was not a naturally solitary man, and his sudden withdrawal was noticed and commented on by coworkers and fellow boarders.
“Whatsamatter, Schmidt? Planning a bank robbery?”
“Nah, betchya it’s girl trouble. Always makes a man moody. Women.”
“He’ll snap out of it. Leave him alone.”
“Hey, Henry, my girl’s got a friend… ya wanna do the town this weekend with us? She’s a looker, believe me.”
“Oh yeah, if she’s such a looker, what’d she want with Schmidty, here?”
He had shrugged off the comments, entered into the banter long enough to stop the teasing, and returned to his thoughts of Gretchen, constantly replaying that night in his head. What he could have done differently. What other words he might have said. How it might have turned out another way.
He had heard the mechanics and pilots at the airfield discussing Hitler’s latest threats, but they all agreed it was Europe’s war, not America’s. Everyone was more interested in Joe Lewis’ latest fight or Lou Gehrig’s shocking diagnosis of chronic infantile paralysis.
Henry looked back at Marcus. “But what’s this about war?”
“Guess you don’t know. You’ve been locked up in your room. Hope you aren’t contagious.” Marcus, a bakery helper perpetually chewing gum, tried to fill Henry in on the excitement. “They’re going to rebroadcast that Chamberlain guy’s announcement at six-thirty.”
“That Chamberlain guy is the prime minister of England, you ninny,” Frank muttered. A college dropout who worked at the local brewery, Frank prided himself on his knowledge of world news. “He’s been an appeaser, you see. He gave away Austria. Then Czechoslovakia. Said it’s peace in our time September of ’38. Remember?”
“So why declare war now?” Marcus asked.
“Poland,” Frank shot back, clearly disgusted with Marcus’s ignorance. “They all said they’d come to the defense of Poland. Hitler invaded Friday, the first of September, and they gave the Germans until today to cease and desist, or England would declare war on Germany. And so they did at noon, London time. That was seven o’clock this morning, our time.”
“Hitler invaded Poland?” Henry couldn’t believe what he missed in one weekend.
“Who said they’d defend Poland?” Marcus asked, ignoring Henry’s question.
“Well, Marcus, you clearly know nothing of the world,” Frank replied sarcastically. “England and France said, that’s who. And now they’ve got to pay up because Hitler’s gone and invaded Poland. With Russia waiting in the wings, no less. They’ll be dividing the country up like a loaf of bread. But first, the Krauts are blasting the hell out of Poland with the Wehrmacht.”
“Bread? What kind of bread? Is wearmack a kind of bread?” Marcus said at the same time Mrs. Landis growled, “Mr. O’Reilly, your language. I’ve warned you about your language. This is a Christian boarding house.”
Henry’s anxiety grew as he listened to this exchange, while Frank continued on his self-appointed task of educating the masses.
“The German Air Force, you dolt. The Wehrmacht. It’s Blitzkrieg. Lightning war. Boom, boom, boom, and the Polacks are dead.”
“Vatch it thar, O’Reilly,” an angry, Polish-accented voice was heard above the babble.
Frank continued unphased. “And now it’s war. And Chamberlain’s likely to resign, 'cause he had all the Brits convinced that they’d be safe, that Hitler was happy with the Sudetenland and then Czechoslovakia.”
Henry, whose grandparents had emigrated from southern Germany in the 1890s, had grown up knowing little about the “old country.” His own father, who had been a tiny baby when the family arrived in Lancaster County and settled among the Germans on the “Cabbage Hill” section of Lancaster, refused to speak German to his children. “You’re American-born.” It was his father who began calling him Henry instead of his given name, Hans, in spite of the fact Henry had been named after his grandfather.
“War,” Henry muttered to himself, unable to comprehend it. England is at war, and Gretchen is there. What would that mean for her?
The only news he had of her was an occasional letter from Naomi, who’d first written him the week Gretchen left for Europe, expressing her regret for her sister’s cruelty. “She didn’t, doesn’t deserve you, Henry. She’s always been a thoughtless, self-centered chit of a girl. I’m sure now you realize what she’s like.”
