The Magic of Ordinary Days Page 22

  Lorelei answered, “They found a good place. Now we should let you get back.”

  As we drove away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t even so much as shared one sentence with Walter and Steven. I knew no more about them than I had before—only that they were handsome, well groomed, and foolish enough to freeze themselves camping out in the December elements. What I had hoped to glean from conversation was a sense of their feelings. As it ended, I could only hope they really cared for Rose and Lorelei.

  On the way back, Lorelei launched a long conversation about upcoming plans for Christmas at the camp—the parties to be held, special entertainment arranged, and traditional American dinners to be served. Rose told me that her English students were making her a present, but she didn’t yet know what it would be. One of the girls had spilled the beans about the gift, but would only say it had something to do with butterflies.

  By the time we returned to the telephone booth, dusk was upon us. Still we had a long way to go before we would reach the camp. My back throbbed from hours spent in the driver’s seat, but I had to ignore it. After all, I had extended this offer. I turned toward Granada and sped up the road. Rose fell asleep against the window, while Lorelei kept me company for the remainder of the drive.

  “Is Rose okay now?” I asked her.

  Lorelei rubbed the cameo pendant, then slipped it inside her shirt as we pulled up to the camp. “Everything is great. Thank you.”

  I wanted badly for them to confide in me, to tell me specifics about the soldiers, to tell me about their feelings. I had told them my deepest secret, yet they had shared little of how they felt about the men. I whispered it out. “He was a soldier, too, you know.”

  Lorelei waited, then lowered her voice. “The father?”

  “Yes.”

  Rose was awake now. She asked me softly, so that I could just barely hear her voice over the sound of the truck’s engine, “Livvy, where is the father?”

  I shrugged. “Somewhere in Europe, I suppose.”

  Lorelei touched my arm and looked at me with eyes full of pain.

  I tried smiling at her. “I made a mistake. A big one. And I just don’t want anything like it to happen to either of you.”

  Lorelei said, “Everything is wonderful.”

  “But what about the men? Do you really know them?”

  “Well enough.” Lorelei stared out the windshield into a hazy three-quarter moon. “We’ve been worried over you.”

  Worried over me? With so much going on in their own lives, why were they worried over me? Then I remembered again that feeling of being in love. Even though danger exists, love blinds you to any bad possibilities. It makes you believe the end result will be good, makes you discount all other outcomes because you can’t bear to believe in them. Instead of protecting their own hearts, Rose and Lorelei were worrying over mine.

  Rose turned away from the window and blinked hard. “Will you be happy, Livvy?”

  “We want you to be happy,” said Lorelei, almost like a command.

  “Before I wasn’t trying, not really. But I’ve already learned a few things. A lot of them from you.”

  “You’ve learned from us?” Lorelei asked, her face surprised.

  “Of course.” I bit my lip and had to look down. “You’ve helped me.”

  Rose and Lorelei glanced at each other. “You’ve helped us, too,” said Rose.

  “More than you know,” added Lorelei.

  I wanted to believe them. Maybe that’s why I saw nothing at all.

  At day’s end, I had driven more county roads in one day than ever before. When I finally made my way down Red Church Road, I parked the truck in front of the house and found Ray standing on the porch waiting for me.

  “I thought you must’ve run away.”

  I trudged up the steps. “I’m so happy to be back.”

  “Long day,” he said. “Run you a bath?”

  “That sounds wonderful.” Inside, I dropped my handbag on the table beside the dishes Ray had left out for dinner. As the bathtub filled, I made myself a plate of food and wolfed it down.

  I sank into the tub up to my neck. In front of me, the island of my abdomen rose out of an ocean of water. I soaked until the tub water started to cool, then I took the bar of soap and lathered my entire body. As I was handling the soap, letting it slip back and forth from one hand to the other, it hit me. Something was wrong. Just beyond my grip, like the slippery soap in my hand, I couldn’t hold on to it or even put a name to it, but I knew it anyway.

  Thirty-two

  The next morning brought bad news of the war in Europe. Just when most of us in America could smell Hitler’s defeat, he launched a great offensive in the same region where once he had crushed the Allies and captured most of Western Europe four years before. The operation, code-named Autumn Mist but later known as the Battle of the Bulge, caught the Allies ill-prepared and split the American and British forces in two.

  Ray and I listened to the news report as we tried to swallow down breakfast. Only eighty thousand war-weary or new Allied forces were battling two hunderd fifty thousand experienced Axis troops. The Germans had encircled the inexperienced 106th Division near St. Vith and captured two-thirds of our men.

  I pushed my plate away. Perhaps the sense of doom I’d felt the night before was a preparation for this news. Abby’s Kent was stationed near the fighting. People all over Europe were starved, sick, and living in ruin. In addition to unimaginable human loss, once-grand cities lay in rubble, and museums, priceless works of art, artifacts, and rare books had gone up in flames.

  Ray rose from the table. “Storm’s coming,” he said. “I’ll be working in the barn. Need to shore it up, replace some boards, and bring in some hay.” He waited before leaving. “You’ll be okay?”

  I nodded, but he was still waiting. I tried to smile. “It’s just this news.”

  Now he swung into his heavy jacket. “Come after me if you need anything.”

  After he left, the cold air that had crept in through the open door closed in around my arms. I went searching for a sweater and pondered what I would do with myself on such a day. Beyond the bedroom window, I saw low gray clouds moving in from the northwest. Not a good day for driving or walking, as the weather would be dreary. Instead, I decided to try some holiday baking.

  After I stirred up cookie batter and had the first batch baking in the oven, I pulled out extra quilts I found on the top shelf of the coat closet and spread these on Ray’s bed and on mine. At the bottom of the stack I found an old blanket full of holes and decided maybe I could lay it out on some hay in the barn for Franklin. But when I mentioned my idea to Ray, he said, “The goat will just eat that blanket.” And I had to believe him that Franklin would be warm enough without it.

  Throughout the day, Ray returned periodically to fill his thermos with hot coffee and to catch up as more news reports continued to stream in. Details of increasing casualties and unexpected defeats caused some of the radio announcers to halt their speeches and gather themselves. On the few occasions when the radio station played music, I turned up the volume and let my mind dance to the tune of anything besides bad news. But when the news reports resumed, I couldn’t just click the radio off. A need to know, to try to understand, still drove me. We turned it off, however, when Ray started bringing down the remaining boxes from the attic.

  The first one he plunked down on the table contained his mother’s buttons. In one jar, I found plain buttons of all different sizes and colors that looked like an assortment of hard candy or jelly beans. In the other jars, I found her more unusual buttons—brass and silver ones that had come from uniforms, painted porcelains, black glass and rhinestone-covered ones, even some made with mother-of-pearl. I found celluloid-covered buttons covered with pictures of MGM movie stars—Loretta Young, Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, and Myrna Loy. One button held the image of the Eiffel Tower, and one very old and rare-looking perfumery button still contained a swatch of wool inside that once had
been moistened with scent.

  In another jar, I found long strings of buttons. Girls in the latter part of the nineteenth century had collected buttons in this way as some kind of good luck charm. I’d have to ask Martha if she remembered the details.

  Ray also carried down a box of his mother’s china and a box of Daniel’s things. A catcher’s glove and baseball cards held together with rubber bands topped that box. Inside were a deflated basketball, a few trophies, and some fishing books. “He must have liked sports,” I said to Ray.

  Ray nodded. “There wasn’t much Daniel couldn’t do. He came out on top more often than not. I guess he figured with that kind of luck, he’d make it back.” Ray sat down for a moment. “I always thought he’d end up married and I’d be the third wheel living around here. I thought he’d be the one with a wife and children, and I’d be a fine uncle, you know, helping out and watching over the kids while Daniel and his wife went to the picture show.”

  Ray brought down the last thing, an old wooden bassinet covered with yellowed and stained cotton. After Ray set it down, he caught his breath. “That’s it.” He pointed at the old bassinet. “I only brought that down to clear everything out up there. I’m sure we can order a new one from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.”

  I carefully tore away the old fabric from around the bassinet and found the bent wood beneath. “Oh, no,” I said to Ray and ran my hands around its curved middle. “I’d rather have this one. I can refinish it and make it beautiful again.”

  Ray looked surprised, but said only, “Whatever you want.”

  That evening, after Ray came in for the last time, we turned the radio back on to listen to updated news while we ate dinner. Ray always ate voraciously after a day out in the cold, and this night was no exception. I studied the raw red streaks painted by bitter winds on his cheeks and found myself wanting to smooth out the cracks I saw dried into his lips. When I looked at him across the table, it didn’t seem possible that he was the same man who once held me in bed. But then again, it seemed to be him, exactly.

  Finally, I dove into my stew.

  A few minutes later, a local announcer broke into the news report already in progress. I listened as the man’s excited voice announced that two German POWs had escaped from Camp Trinidad and were still at large. Local police officers were on the men’s trail, but the officials were warning all citizens to be on the lookout and to lock their doors.

  As those words sank into me, my throat narrowed, and pressure built inside my cheeks. Ray was standing over me now, and I had to make myself swallow the tasteless mass of food in my mouth.

  “Go down the wrong way?” he was asking.

  I shook my head. I caught my breath and asked myself what had come over me.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Ray was saying. He put a hand on my shoulder. “They’ll catch those prisoners. They always do. Most of them speak such broken English, they never get far.”

  Speak such broken English? Never get far?

  Now I was breathing regularly again, but I couldn’t eat another bite. I kept remembering that whirlwind I’d driven through the day before, and then chastising myself for giving any credence to that kind of superstition. But then I remembered the strong sense of impending doom that had come over me later the same evening, in the bathtub, its sweep of me as deadly as a breath of the gases made at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. What had caused that? In twenty-four years, I’d never known such a strong sense of foreboding to come to me without some reason.

  Today, two German POWs escaped from Camp Trinidad and are still at large.

  Now I had to stand up and go to the sink. I ran water and started scrubbing dishes, my thoughts racing around in circles as I rubbed the sponge outside and inside each glass, over and over, getting off every single spot, just as my father had once cleaned those glasses of his. As I worked, Ray sat and watched me with worried eyes. “Please tell me what it is.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  I cleaned and dried every dish, then took a broom and swept away new cobwebs that had recently formed in the kitchen corners. The news continued with a report from the Pacific theater, which wasn’t good, either. In the Philippines, two more ships were sunk by kamikazes on the way to the island of Mindoro, and a storm hit the island with ninety-mile-per-hour winds, sinking three destroyers and drowning 279 men. Reports of brutality by the Japanese toward prisoners also came streaming in, with such horrific revelations as Americans ignited with gasoline-lit torches and buried alive.

  Ray shook his head. “At least at Pearl Harbor, they died quick.”

  I came to him then, sat in his lap, wrapped my arms around him, and held him to me as closely as I could. I wanted to kiss his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, but something stopped me. On the radio, the local news announcer came back on, preempting the nationals and updating an earlier story of interest. The two escaped German POWs, Afrika Korps corporals, had been captured in northern New Mexico after having camped out in a remote canyon.

  I stood up and went to the radio. The announcer went on. A trucker who picked up the POWs hitchhiking on the highway had immediately recognized strong German accents. Instead of driving them farther south as they had requested, he drove them to the local county sheriff’s office. The prisoners surrendered without a fight, and according to the deputy on duty, even expressed relief that their ordeal, however short, was over. They hadn’t known a winter storm was coming, hadn’t worn adequate clothing or brought with them appropriate supplies. They sat before the stove at the sheriff’s office, warming up, until guards from Camp Trinidad could travel down and pick them up.

  Now I knew. They hadn’t spoken a word to me because they couldn’t do it without giving away who they were. But because of me, they did get far.

  Now I was covered by a hoard of hungry bees and they were besting me. The radio on the counter blurred before me, and pressure built in my cheekbones. I blasted out the first sneeze, then a second.

  Lorelei had said Stephan, not because she was nervous, but because that was how she knew him. And the uniforms, the perfectly neat and new-appearing uniforms. With Rose and Lorelei’s skills in tailoring, an American Army uniform would have been a snap to duplicate. Once they had told me of meeting German POWs while working the same farms. Now it all made sense to me, the tension between the two of them, the secrecy about these boyfriends.

  Ray came to stand behind me while continued reports of the escape screamed at me from the radio. “Tell me,” he pleaded.

  But I only sneezed once more before I calmed myself. The POWs had been recaptured, I kept saying to myself. No harm had been done. And perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. Perhaps Walter and Steven were American soldiers, just as I’d believed them to be only a few minutes before. Perhaps the similarities were simply coincidences. I had no evidence to the contrary. But hard as I tried to convince myself, in some center place of me, I already knew. Much as I kept trying to push it out of my mind’s knowing eye, it sat there nonetheless, for no one else except me to see.

  Later, I must have looked quite content standing at my kitchen sink and gazing past the ice-encrusted windowpanes into the night. Funny that sometimes people undergoing the worst kind of discord in their lives can look so calm. But Ray could see. He pushed aside the paperwork he usually worked on in the evenings and watched me. Occasionally he’d ask me to sit down and please tell him what was bothering me, but I hadn’t as yet fully admitted it to myself, so how could I tell another?

  Bedtime couldn’t come. All I could see before me was a night of tangling with the sheets, and when I did slip into the bed where once Ray’s parents had slept together, I curled my legs high into my rounded body and dreamed of those green summer days that now seemed years ago. It was the first subzero night of the winter, and from the walls, I could feel the frigid air oozing into my room through invisible seams. Although I bunched the quilts in all around me, and although we had the propane stove burning full out, the chill inside me refused to b
udge. Every time I started to drift away into slumber, the words of the radio announcer came pouring back in over me as if I were a rock at the base of a waterfall.

  Rose and Lorelei had lied to me and used me for transportation. How long ago had the plan been hatched? So many things began to make sense. I’d never seen them working in the silkscreen shop because they were probably sewing clothes for the men off in a place where no one could find them. But it wasn’t their betrayal that bothered me. I understood going against everything taught and drilled since childhood. I had done it, too, and all for the promise of love.

  My right calf drew up into a cramp. I threw back the covers, jumped out of bed, and stepped down on my foot, effectively stopping the cramping. But then I couldn’t make myself get back in bed. Instead, I found myself in Ray’s open doorway. He slept on his side under smooth quilts, facing me. I listened to the long deep breaths he took while soundly sleeping. I studied the gentle curve of his fingers laid out on the pillow in front of his face. And when I sank down on the bed beside him, he awakened, but moved only enough to give me more space on the narrow mattress of the bunk bed. Then he held me from behind, as once he’d done before, and kissed the back of my neck and the tops of my shoulders. In his arms, even the anguished cries of coyotes coming out of the black night sounded like songs. Ray’s body and mine rested together like a pair of stacked bowls, and finally, I slept.

  I slept until the earliest gray of daybreak sent my eyes flying open.

  In the warm circle of Ray’s arms, thoughts began to bat around inside me. I had knowledge of the escape, information that, as a good citizen, I should share with the authorities. But if I talked, I would doom Rose and Lorelei to pay for the parts they had played. And now I found that I disagreed with my father. Rose and Lorelei had made the worst of mistakes, and I couldn’t imagine the anguish that had led them to do it. Despite Lorelei’s justifiable anger for their imprisonment, for everything they’d been through, she had never seemed vengeful to me. I’d never imagined them concocting so elaborate a deception and crime. The German POWs had convinced them; I was sure of it. Rose and Lorelei had fallen in love and wanted to rescue soldiers, just like so many other women before them had done. And even though it didn’t excuse their parts, I understood it.