I'll Be Seeing You (15 page)

March 21, 1944

ROCKPORT, MASSACHUSETTS

Dearest Rita,

Spring! Oh, beautiful (cold, dreary, icy) New England spring! My plants are growing and I just can’t wait to put them in the ground. It’s not safe to plant most things until Mother’s Day...and that seems a world away.

Rita, how I enjoy your stories of Mrs. K. I’ve begun reading them to Levi...I hope that’s okay. Not your entire letters—those belong to me. But your stories! My goodness. You should pen a novel while you’re sitting at that desk. I love to think of you there at work. Making all the women in your life, in your town, realize that it’s possible to leave their kitchens and be active members of society.

Here in Rockport things are waking up after the long, icy winter. The church bell tolls almost every day. I’ve stopped being able to attend most memorial services. Too many boys are dying. It seems like a lie. Like an impossibility. And the war itself seems stuck in the mud of a European spring. Robert says it feels like “two steps forward, three steps back” all the time.

I’ve been a wizard in the kitchen. I love to cook. I think it’s so
odd
that every week now I make speeches trying to liberate women from the shackles of wifely serfdom...at the same point in my life where I’m learning just how good I can be at homemaking. I’ve learned to sew, knit and crochet. (Truthfully I used to do these things with my nanny, but I haven’t revisited the skills as a grown woman.) I know you probably do all these things better than I do, but I’ve made you something. I hope you like them.

Overalls. Yes! I’ve taken men’s overalls and pulled in the midsection and shortened the length. I’ve completely guessed at your size. (If you need them bigger or smaller just send me your measurements. Look at me, assuming you will like them.)

I’ve taken the liberty to embroider some vines and flowers on the legs and bib. I’ve made them for the women in town, and they are quite popular. Who would have thought such things were possible. Such joy coming from overalls.

I love wearing them with Robert’s old flannel shirts. And I never wear my hair up anymore (only when I’m cooking). And I don’t even try to have it cut or tame the curls. They just fall all around me. Levi tells me Robert won’t recognize me. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. That situation is still holding...but it’s so, so complicated, Rita. I can’t even tell you.

Anna is getting older by the day. It’s a sad thing, watching someone so vital begin to age rapidly. Marie has taken over the Sunday masses, but I’m in charge of almost all the organizing now.

And did you hear? They’ve begun allowing students at Radcliffe to attend classes at Harvard! When I heard the news I immediately thought of a good use to that abandoned house of mine in Cambridge. I’ve decided to turn it into a boardinghouse for women who want to go to school but can’t afford it. I’ve gone so far as to speak with some architects about possible renovations, and I’ve applied for the necessary permits.

Someday, mark my words, women will be allowed into elite colleges. Harvard was my father’s alma mater. And I would have loved to go. But no matter how much money or power you have in society, women are always excluded. Is the university where you work coeducational? I sure hope so. Someday I’d like to set up scholarships. In my mother’s name.

All my best,

Glory

P.S. As soon as the lemon balm revives I’m going to make your tea for Robbie. I’m certain it will put pink right into my son’s cheeks. Thank you so much for being my darling Garden Witch.

March 25, 1944

IOWA CITY, IOWA

Dear Glory,

Oh, your package came today and I had to write immediately. I adore your gift. Thank you ever so much. Good, strong fabric is hard to come by, and my pair of dungarees has just about disintegrated. You got the height right, but I’m going to take the waist in an inch or two. Turns out rationing is good for one thing besides feeding our troops—trimming my figure! I’m about the same size I was before I had Toby—imagine that! I can’t wait for Sal to see the newly svelte me.

I was delighted to hear about your philanthropy. The University of Iowa—I’m proud to say—has always allowed women to attend. In the first group of students, one-quarter were women. That was a century ago—do you feel the turmoil of the past few decades has made folks less open-minded? That’s certainly something to think about, and definitely something to fight against if the answer is yes.

Providing young women with opportunities is as wise an investment as putting your money in oil or automobiles. We don’t know what the world will be like after the effects of this war settle. Will Hitler have his New World Order? I don’t like to think so. However, the world will be a new place, with all the shifts and realignments that come with change. We best prepare
all
of our citizens for that.

I was fifteen when the first war ended. I don’t remember much about Armistice Day—my mother would not let me attend parades because she worried I’d catch the Spanish flu. I do have memories of my father saying he was glad he’d left Germany when he did, mostly because he understood the suffering that would befall the losers. (“To the victors goes the future,” he said, or something like that.) My pop was a conservative man, fairly risk-adverse. We lived in a neighborhood we could afford surrounded by people who’d set up a small island of no-nonsense Germans in the middle of wild, lawless Chicago.

He called my mother his “Mäuschen” (little mouse). She did have a tiny frame and retiring demeanor, but also a tubercular cough, a sure hand in the kitchen and the kindest blue eyes I’d ever seen.

Occasionally she’d shave enough off the household budget to take me down to Marshall Fields & Co. for window-shopping and lunch at the Walnut Room. One day, a few months after the war ended, she told me to put on my best dress—we were headed downtown.

It was winter, but late in the season, when the sharpness in the air is replaced by the promise of spring. We strolled down State Street, arm in arm, and I remember thinking I was going to order the chicken pot pie, even though I always did.

But then we walked right past the department store. I tugged on my mother’s arm but she was surprisingly strong, pulling me over to where a policeman stood absentmindedly tapping his baton against his open palm.

“Sir, could you please tell me where I can find the Prison Special tour?” she asked in halting, overpolite English.

He leaned over her, I thought, because her voice barely rose above a whisper. Then I recognized the curl of his lip and the cruel gleam in his eye. It was the expression of a boy I knew at school who liked to push me in the mud.

“Go home, lady,” he said in a rough Irish brogue, poking at her shoulder with one thick finger. “Don’t be bringing your daughter to see those harlots.”

My mother turned seven different shades of red. “Come, Marguerite,” she said to me, and we wandered the streets of Chicago until we spotted a large, agitated crowd. Many had signs shouting “Votes for Women!” and “Suffrage Not Torture!”

A group of stern-faced women stood on a dais with a Prison Special banner flapping high above their heads. My mother fell into contemplative silence, so it was up to me to piece together what I was looking at. I stood very still and pitched forward, trying to hear every word.

After a while the circumstance became clear. These women had spent time in prison for exercising their first amendment rights. They’d been abused and humiliated. A few wore prison costumes—horribly rough calico dresses with rags pinned to the waist.

They exhibited more energy and passion than any women I’d ever met.

We listened, my mother and I, until the chilled earth seeped into our shoes and our cheeks stung with cold. When the speeches were done and the rally began to disperse, my mother placed one gloved hand on my arm, squeezing until I looked her in the eye.

“Sie sind nicht eine Maus,”
she said.

You are not a mouse.

My mother would be so proud of what you are doing, Glory, as would your mother.

As am I.

Love,

Rita

March 30, 1944

ROCKPORT, MASSACHUSETTS

Dear Rita,

My hands shake as I write this letter. The most horrible thing has happened. Well, not the most horrible thing. No one (close to me) has died.

But I went to a memorial for another boy I knew growing up. A neighbor of Levi’s. I felt I needed to go and support him. Levi cried silently through the service, his body steeled against the internal shaking. The grief and the shame radiated off him like August sunlight. I left the children with Marie, and as it turned out, that was a VERY good decision.

After the mass I held Levi close. Closer than I’ve allowed him in ages. We sat in the pews after everyone went down to our local coffee shop for the reception. He placed his head against my chest and I murmured empty words of solace. Right there in God’s house, I comforted him. All he could say was, “Why can’t I go? Why can’t I go?” and I cried, too. For him...and for the boy who died...and for Robbie. May he never be kept from doing anything he feels he must do.

Afterward, we went to a local coffee shop. (The proprietor closed it for the family whose house is too small. It was really so gracious. If there is one thing this war is doing it’s helping us be more human to one another....) I approached the boy’s mother to pay my respects.

And she slapped my face.

“I’d spit at you if I could, you tramp! Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are with your house high on your hill and your deeded ocean rights? Making speeches telling our daughters to go to work instead of staying home—which is their godly duty? JUST WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE fooling with a man who is not your husband while that husband is at war? We know you! We ALL know you!”

The room went dead silent. She shook with sobs. Her husband looked at me, and there was apology in his eyes which—I think—hurt me most of all. And then he ushered her out of the shop.

I began to walk...and then I ran. I ran, Rita. All the way home. Down Main Street. Through the rotaries, I ran where only cars should go. And then I ran up my private road to my house on the hill.

And she’s right.

Who do I think I am?

Glory

P.S. And, I’ve only just realized something that I hadn’t before. If this town knows, then Robert will find out. Oh, Rita. I’m in a big, fat mess. One of my own making, but a mess just the same.

April 3, 1944

IOWA CITY, IOWA

Dear Glory,

When I got your letter I truly hoped you’d found mine waiting for you when you returned from your walk. Consider it an embrace from across these many miles.

I can’t condemn someone for talking through grief. That woman felt her sacrifice gave her the right to speak to you in that manner, but it doesn’t mean her opinion is a correct one.

Even so, being slapped with someone else’s reality is still a slap. What did it awaken in you? An awareness of the harsh nature of cause and effect? In some ways you’ve allowed this woman to construct her opinion, and though it may be as flimsy and unstable as a house of cards, the deck was comprised of your actions.

So act differently. Those three teenagers dancing under an indulgent moon? They’re gone. Let them go. The fairy tales spun by the past have no bearing on our present. History is telling us to. Your current life demands it. That woman says she knows you? Impossible. You don’t know yourself yet. But you will.

You
are capable of so much, hon. I don’t always agree with your choices, but it’s a sign of your growing spirit that you continue to make them...and cheer the outcome or suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, you are doing the latter right now, but in no way should that stop you from figuring out where you fit in this changing world.

And poor Levi. He needs to find his place, as well. This war has so many casualties, including his self-respect. It truly is the touchiest of topics, the boys who stayed home. I thought you were absolutely right in your observation, however ironic, that war gives so many opportunities for kindness. Can you find a way to be a good friend to Levi without wrecking your marriage? You must.

As for Robert, I believe honesty is ultimately the best route. That said, I haven’t always lived by that belief. Secrets are strange, volatile things, often bursting into the public sphere at the most inopportune times.

I’m seeing this play out before my eyes with Charlie and Irene. They’ve grown uncomfortable around each other since that ill-fated meeting with Mrs. Kleinschmidt. Charlie’s secret—whatever it is—is a knife scraping at the slender rope tying them together. I know Irene wants to ask him questions, but I fear she already believes the worst scenario her feverish brain can envision. For her, it’s more tolerable to suffer through this strange purgatory between a healthy and broken relationship than risk an actual confrontation.

Charlie’s got the itch to run. I can see it in the way he sits—back stiff, legs folded, feet on the ground, palms down and ready to push off. The thing is, it’s taken me a while to figure out what’s in his heart, but I honestly think there is good in there. Or at least the good far outweighs the bad. It’s only in the telling of his secret that the burden will release, for both of them. It’s up to you to decide whether or not releasing yours will do the same, for Robert, Levi and yourself.

So my advice for the day is this: brush your hair, put on lipstick and go into town for a walk. Hold your head high and your spirit higher. Remember the words of our venerable First Lady: “It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know.” (I snipped this quotation from her newspaper column years ago and keep it along with a bunch of others by my bedside. Sal teases me about it, but I’ve caught him reading them. I think he’s got a crush on old Eleanor. But then again, who wouldn’t?)

Take care, dear.

With love,

Rita