Mrs. Lieutenant: A Sharon Gold Novel (3 page)

Jim glances at Kim, his eyebrows raised. He
wants her to say something.

"How did you two meet?" she asks.

Susanna beams, taking Billy Jr. from her
husband's arms and bouncing him on her knees.

"We met in senior year of high school. His
folks had just moved to town. It was love at first sight..." – she
glances at her husband – "... and a way to escape my granny's
house."

"I was just as poor and ignorant as she was,
but I was enlisting in the army right after high school graduation.
I had a future." Bill grins.

"We got married on a two-day leave from basic
training," Susanna says as Billy Jr. gurgles his appreciation of
the horsey ride. "I got pregnant on our weddin' night. Neither one
of us knew a darn thing about sex or birth control."

Again that flush of relief. Kim could have
been as ignorant as Susanna on her own wedding night.

"What did you do?" Kim asks.

"Bought a washin' machine and dryer. Bill got
to go to OCS – Officers Candidate School. I took in wash from the
other men and it helped support me and the baby."

Jim turns to Bill. "Weren't you worried about
your wife talking to all those single men? You never know what
single men might be after."

A stab of pain above her left eye. Please may
he not start.

Bill leans forward as if he can see through
Jim, then he says, "I'm talking about my buddies. In OCS – OCS is
hell on wheels, 120 days of pure hell – you can't survive if you
can't trust your buddies and they can't trust you. There's a motto
– 'Cooperate and graduate.' You'd do well to remember that." He
leans back.

"And once I finished OCS it was better. We
had more money on a second lieutenant's salary and we were entitled
to housing. Susanna could stop doing laundry for the men."

Mercifully Susanna turns to her husband
before Jim can say anything more. "Then you went to Vietnam and I
was left alone with a baby who cried all the time."

Bill stands up and grins. "That's what army
wives put up with. Now let's eat before we scare these newcomers.
Jim won't have to think about a Vietnam tour for a while."

He turns to the
two of them. "You can both enjoy your time at Ft. Knox."

“
Your knowledge and practice of Army customs will
enable you to eliminate and avoid many misunderstandings and
uncertain moments that are apt to arise when you unintentionally
disregard a practice or custom because of lack of knowledge or
uncertainty.”
Mrs. Lieutenant
booklet

The reflection of the oval-shaped face with
its slightly brownish skin tone in the bathroom mirror is certainly
her own Donna Lautenberg thinks. Yet her face doesn't give away any
hints as to how she feels, standing here like this, anticipating
her husband's first day of active duty. It isn't that she's having
deja vu. It's just that she feels … different, a shiver of
apprehension running up her back.

Will she fit in? Can she play by a whole new
set of rules? After all those years of being an "army brat" of an
enlisted man will she finally be accepted now that she is married
to an Anglo and an officer, or will she still be a Puerto Rican
outsider?

She continues to study her face, the face
that reminds her of the other important people in her life, the
face that reminds her of where she's come from. She'll write her
brother tomorrow. She won't tell him about her fears of fitting in.
He has enough to worry about.

"This apartment's not bad," Jerry says,
coming into the bathroom behind her and putting his arms around
her. He presses his muscular body up against hers and she feels his
“excitement.” He leans over and kisses her right ear, then looks at
her face.

"Maybe you shouldn't have come with," he
says. "It's only for a few weeks and I know how hard this must be
for you."

She hugs him back, then pulls away and goes
into the bedroom. There, lying on the bed, are six tiny yellow
roses, still in their green tissue paper.

Jerry follows her out of the bathroom. She
swings around and kisses him. "When did you get those? How did you
know? You're so wonderful!"

He grins. "When I went out to get the milk.
They’re perfect for our first night in our new apartment."

She kisses him again.

"Come on, let's test the bed," he says.
"That's the only thing that matters."

**

The shots scatter the students. They run,
their breath jammed in their throats, anticipating the thud that
can bring them crashing to the ground. A National Guardsman aims
his rifle at Donna.

The blast wakes her.

She shakes her head in the early morning
light. She knows the nightmare is of Kent State, a place she never
heard of until the news yesterday.

In her mind she now sees the student protest
against ROTC at Jerry's college as he once described it to her:
Right after winter break, in January of 1968, when the students
returned to campus, their bellies stuffed with home cooking and
their pockets jangling with Christmas cash.

On the first day of classes the protesting
students converged upon Jerry and the other marching ROTC students
with banners displaying peace symbols and chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids did you kill today?" The ROTC cadets tussled with the
protesters. By the time the campus police arrived, Jerry had a
broken arm – and later a reprimand from his ROTC instructor for
"engaging with the enemy without orders to do so."

Two months after that protest President
Johnson surprised everyone by announcing he would not run for
reelection and ordering a reduction in the bombing of North
Vietnam. And another two months later peace talks started in Paris.
Not that those talks have accomplished anything in two whole years.
American military personnel are still dying daily halfway across
the world – and now American students are being shot to death on
college campuses.

Donna looks at Jerry still asleep, then eyes
the six yellow roses spotting the floor, knocked there by last
night's "testing."

She climbs out of bed and steps over the
flowers on her way to the bathroom. The diaphragm has been in long
enough.

She ties on a robe as she thinks about Jerry.
He's the best thing that ever happened to her, something so
unexpected and sweet that it still makes her feel giddy when she
pictures their first meeting. Even now.

She isn't superstitious, really she isn't,
she just doesn't want to tempt fate by dwelling on her good
fortune.

This morning she has to unpack before she
writes her brother. After she and Jerry moved their suitcases and
boxes into this furnished apartment yesterday evening, she'd been
too tired to do anything else. "Let's leave everything for tomorrow
and take it easy our first night at Ft. Knox," she had said.

The doorbell rings. Did the apartment manager
forget to tell them something yesterday? Donna hopes the bell
doesn't wake Jerry.

Outside the front door stands a short man
wearing a Western Union uniform that pulls across a beer barrel
chest. A yellow envelope dangles from his hand.

The next thing she knows Jerry has his arms
around her and they are sitting together on the floor of the living
room. "What happened?" she asks.

"You fainted."

Donna struggles out of his arms and stands
up. Jerry, in a bathrobe that hangs open in front, stands too. "Why
would I do that?"

"There was a man – it was a mistake – looking
for someone named Holden to deliver a telegram to. You took one
look at him and fainted."

This is bad, very bad. She'll never make it
as an officer's wife if she overreacts to everything.

She takes a deep breath and kisses Jerry.
"Maybe I'm hungry," she says.

He kisses her back. "Let's have
breakfast."

She walks into the kitchen. The familiarity
of a sink, refrigerator and stove calms her.

As she takes a skillet from the packing box
perched on the tiny counter, she makes a resolution: For now she'll
only think of the present.

She'll banish the past and future from her mind.

“
... it is true that a wife has no rank, but she
does have position created by her husband’s rank, which is
respected and accepted by Army custom.”
Mrs.
Lieutenant
booklet

"Mama, it's me," Wendy Johnson shouts into
the telephone mouthpiece. "Nelson and I are at a gas station
outside Ft. Knox. We're just filling up and then we're going to go
see about finding a place to stay."

She listens to her mother's words of advice –
"remember you're in the white world now," listens as she has always
listened, then promises to call tomorrow and hangs up. She comes
out of the phone booth and slides into the passenger side of the
Mustang.

"What'd your mama say?" Nelson asks.

"The same as always. And we're to call as
often as we can."

"She sure is a broken record, your mama."

"She usually has good advice, advice we can't
afford to ignore."

Nelson lifts one hand off the steering wheel
and pats Wendy's left arm. "Sweetie, it's going to be fine. Heck,
I'm an officer of the United States Army. I
will
be treated with respect and saluted and looked up
to by the enlisted men and the rest of society."

Wendy turns away from her husband for a
moment so he can't see her eyes. It isn't his fault she's from such
a protected environment that she hasn't been subjected to much
racial prejudice. Now for the first time she might have to face
what being a black in America really means. The thought terrifies
her.

The night before they left South Carolina her
papa called her into his study, the room that has always been the
most comforting for Wendy, surrounded by his medical texts and
medical school degrees and certificates. He sat behind his oversize
mahogany desk in his red leather chair and she sat in a matching
armchair facing him.

"Honey," he said, "your mama and I have
always tried to do the best for you. We've done some things right
and I'm sure a whole lot of things wrong. And maybe some of those
things we thought we did right were really wrong."

What was he leading up to? She rubs her hands
along the red leather armrests.

"We wanted you to be proud, proud of yourself
and your race. And to do that we chose to protect you as much as we
could from the real world as you were growing up."

He fiddled with papers on his desk, creating
several small piles from a single large one as if laying bricks end
to end, then returned his attention to her.

"Your mama and I kept as much as we could
from you of the truth about the treatment of black people in
America. We didn't want you to know how bad it can be."

He paused again and Wendy thought about her
rudimentary school learning of the slaves in the South, the
aftermath of Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement. It had
all been pretty much book learning, because in her own black
community – and then later at an all-black college in Texas – she
led a rather sheltered life, not exposed to the rest of the world.
This move to Ft. Knox would be her first time truly in the white
world.

"When I was in the army in World War II," her
papa was saying, "it was strictly segregated units. It wasn't until
the Korean War – and that's only 20 years ago – that there were
integrated units. And I'm afraid," he said, his speech slowing,
"that the army may not have changed as much as we would like it to
have."

"Do you think Nelson will have problems?"
Wendy asked, holding her breath to see how much her papa would say
now that he had started down this "truthful" path.

"It will depend on a lot of factors,” he
said, “including how you both handle yourselves. You and Nelson
will have to wait and see."

Her father then stood and came around his
desk to hug her. "Your mama and I wish you and Nelson all the
best," he said.

That night when she and Nelson got ready for
bed, Nelson asked, "What did your papa want with you in
private?"

Wendy stood with her nightgown still in her
hands, her nude body outlined by the glow of the lamp behind her.
She opened her mouth to tell her husband, then changed her mind.
Nelson always chided her for her naiveté. And she was naive – why
shouldn't she be? As her mama once said, "Why hear bad news? It
only makes you feel bad and you usually can't do anything about
it."

In the same way Wendy hadn't really thought
about blacks in America, she had refused to think about Nelson's
army commitment. Why think of it ahead of time when she couldn't do
anything about it? And even if her father's words had worried her,
she wasn't about to admit this to Nelson. He'd just say something
like "You're finally catching on."

Instead she smiled and said, "He wanted to
say good-bye and wish us luck." Then she got into bed. She knew the
moment Nelson slid in beside her he'd forget the conversation,
instantly immersed in his nightly exploration of the mysteries of
her body. They had only been married four months.

Now here they are outside Ft. Knox, Kentucky,
about to look for an apartment for themselves for the first time.
They lived with her parents after their December graduation and
wedding. Nelson worked in her papa's office and she practiced
cooking and keeping house with her mama while waiting for Nelson to
go on active duty.

The minimal active duty information they
received from the army lists a housing office. Nelson stops the car
at the entrance to Ft. Knox – they are here! – and asks the soldier
there for directions to the office.