Some Luck (43 page)

Rosanna expected the girl to say, “Last summer,” but she said, “I never have.”

“Are you really his fiancée?”

Hildy stared at Rosanna for a moment, then burst into tears. “But I should be!” she said. “I was going to be! If he hadn’t left so suddenly, I would be. We were getting along beautifully. He told me everything.”

Rosanna took a sip of tea, then set the cup and saucer on the table. She said, “With Frankie, that might be a reason that you would never be his fiancée.”

“Why? Why would that be?” Her voice rose. Clearly this was a thought she had had herself.

“Look, Hildy. I’m not saying that I understand Frankie, or ever have. He’s not like anyone in our family that we know of. But I do know that if you expect him to do something and he senses your expectation, that’s enough to make him not do it.”

Hildy had taken off one of her gloves, and now she started twisting it between her hands. Rosanna reached for it, took it, and smoothed it on the table. Hildy, whose crying had subsided, started again. When was the last time Rosanna had seen any of her children cry? Joey, maybe, about some animal’s death. But that had been years ago by this point. No one cried at Rolf’s funeral or Oma’s funeral. Rosanna said, “You’re a beautiful girl, Hildy. You need to find someone else.”

Hildy shook her head. “I tried. And one of them did ask me to marry him, but I couldn’t. I can’t forget Frank.”

“What does your mother say?”

“She doesn’t know. Frank would never come to Decorah to meet anyone.”

“There you go,” said Rosanna.

“I can’t do it,” said Hildy.

The one who broke the spell was Claire, who slammed through the front door, saying, “Whose car is that? Hi! Who are you?”

This girl, Hildy, reassembled herself in about two seconds, so quickly that Rosanna would have bet that Claire had no idea of the scene that she had intruded upon. Hildy smiled, reached forward, picked up and slipped on the glove Rosanna had laid on the table. She
said, “That’s my car. I’m Hildy Bergstrom. I knew your brother in college, and I was passing by. Are you Claire?”

Claire nodded.

“Well, I need to leave if I want to get to Albert Lea at a decent hour.” She stood up and put on her coat. Truly, her surface was perfect, thought Rosanna. Her makeup was hardly smudged, which meant that it wasn’t makeup—the beauty belonged to her. From a pure breeding standpoint, Rosanna thought, the two specimens of livestock known as Frank and Hildy would certainly produce champions, wouldn’t they?

She took Hildy to the door, and Claire walked her to her car. She came back with a box of fudge and said, “She was nice.”

“She was,” said Rosanna.

ALL THROUGH GERMANY
, Ruben made himself a little business, and Frank didn’t stop him. In every town and village that they passed through, Ruben went into houses and shops and stole things. It wasn’t hard—the Jerries ran off when they saw the Americans coming, and they didn’t always lock up behind themselves. Even when they did, Ruben smashed a window or kicked open a door. If there was someone cowering inside, Ruben banished her from the house, then went through the things. Sometimes there was jewelry, but Ruben was more interested in lace and figurines, fancy letter openers, music boxes, ornate picture frames, silver hairbrushes and hand mirrors. He took one or two items every day. What was astonishing to Frank was that the houses did have doors—and windowpanes and roofs and nice things. That Ruben should export some of these nice items to a shop his cousin had in Cape May, New Jersey, was okay with Frank. What Frank saw that he wished he could export was that gunpowder the Germans used—smokeless and entirely unrevealing of the shooter’s position. Or those machine guns they had, which fired so quickly that they made one long buzzing sound instead of series of pops, like American weapons. The tanks. The 88s. The Bouncing Betties. The Teller mines. The Russians had more manpower and the Americans had more money, but the Germans had know-how that Professor Cullhane could only dream of.

The slave camp they stumbled across was called Kaufering. All the slaves, who looked barely alive, were bundled into huts dug out of the ground and roofed over. The men (or boys) were like skeletons draped with rags—Frank had never seen anything like them, even in France, even in Italy. It was hard to decide which was more horrifying: the long pile of tormented corpses laid out on the ground, their sticklike arms and legs askew, and their heads angled back as if they were still screaming in pain, or the not-yet-dead, who looked just the same but were still standing (barely) and breathing. They had been employed, apparently, in building airplanes or rockets, but how they could even lift their tools Frank could not understand. Another unit, Frank heard, had come across some of these people being driven by their Jerry captors deeper into Germany. This seemed to be the last thing the Germans wanted to do, the thing they cared most about—shooting their slaves. The slaves were Jewish. Like Julius. Like Rosa. It made Frank feel frozen and horror-struck in a way he had not felt on the battlefield.

They had a look at Hitler’s summer residence, the Berghof. Though most of it had been bombed to pieces before they got there, there was plenty to look at, and both the place where Hitler was said to have had tea every day, and another place, higher up, were intact. Ruben made himself busy finding things in the garden, and he did get two items—a spoon that he found under a bush, and a button. He told everyone it was Hitler’s own button, the one that popped off his fly when he was pissing himself in fear. But Frank pointed out that Hitler hadn’t been there since the previous July. Ruben said, “He knew we were coming.” These souvenirs he intended to keep, “unless I get a good offer.”

Around the time they got to Berchtesgaden, they began hearing rumors about the Russians—that Ike didn’t want to confront the Russians, that the Russians were taking Berlin, that the Russians were coming in hordes from the east and overrunning everything, that the Russians could not be stopped, that their own units had been ordered to meet up with the Fifth Army, which had been making its way up through Italy, so that in case the Russians showed up there would be plenty of them to fight the Russians back to Germany or Czechoslovakia or wherever. There were so many Russians that they
could get all the way to western France—this was why no one was being sent home, or even to the Pacific. The next war could easily begin.

Because of Eloise and Julius, Frank was the only one he knew who had any ideas about Stalin, but listening to Eloise and Julius argue all those months in Chicago had done its work—the argument had never been about whether Stalin would kill his friends, only about how close to Stalin you had to be to get it first. Julius always swore that Trotsky’s greatest mistake was leaving Stalin back in the Kremlin—he should never have trusted Stalin for a moment. Eloise always said, well, how could he have known, and things needed to be done, and when you were part of a unit, trust was essential. And then there were the trials. Maybe the ones who were executed had done something, said Eloise; no, they hadn’t, said Julius. It went on and on. So Frank was pretty sure that Stalin was waiting to get organized, and then he would push to the west, and the next war would begin. But Ruben and Cornhill didn’t agree. Cornhill thought that Stalin couldn’t care less about Europe, that he would concentrate on rebuilding all those towns—Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kharkov—that the Germans had destroyed. “We can worry about him in ten years,” said Cornhill. Ruben didn’t care. He thought France and Germany, not to mention Italy, were such a mess that Stalin was welcome to them. “They ain’t spending my money to fix up this dump” was what he said.

Frank said, “I didn’t think you paid taxes.”

Ruben shrugged. “You get my meaning, though. We done our bit. I knew some commies in Jersey City.” He rolled his eyes.

JOE LIKED TO THINK
of Lillian’s birthday as the first day of the harvest—if they were lucky. He kept this to himself, but enjoyed the meals Rosanna always cooked for the birthday. Harvesting was hard work, and he needed a little extra sustenance in the form of, say, a seven-layer cake, to keep him going, especially if the remainder of the cake got sent home with him because Lillian was watching her weight. This year, though, he, Walter, and John got stuck in the fence line in a wet spot at Grandpa Wilmer’s, and it took Grandpa Wilmer, who was all the way at the other corner of the farm, two hours to bring his own tractor over and pull them out. Joe knew this was his
fault—he should have walked that part of the field. Papa wasn’t mad, though, because he hadn’t bothered to walk it, either. On the way home, Walter said, “Someday, I will give you a list of all the mistakes I’ve made, and then another list of all the mistakes my father has made that I thought I would never make. You can compare the two.”

Everyone was there when they came in, and it turned out they weren’t going to miss anything—not the rib roast or the scalloped potatoes or the crescent rolls. Lois was there—Joe could see her through the screen door, sitting by the table, watching something intently. It didn’t matter what, Joe knew; Lois was a watcher—it could be flies on the ceiling. Lillian was up in her room, reading and, Joe knew, pretending that this was a surprise party. Walter blew out some air, threw his cap onto the hook, and started washing up. Joe kicked off a boot, and then heard his mom say, “That is just like him, I swear, saying we ought to hand over how to build an atomic bomb like a doughnut recipe, just to be nice.”

Minnie, whom Joe couldn’t see, said, “All the scientists say it’s easy to figure out. The more we say it’s our secret, the more they are going to want it.” Minnie sounded rather unlike herself—confident and a little argumentative.

Walter opened the door, saying, “Who are you talking about?”

“Well, who do you think?” said Rosanna. “Henry Wallace. It said on the radio that he told the Senate that we should hand over the bomb to the Russians.”

“What do you care?” said Walter.

“Oh, he just gets my goat,” said Rosanna. “Always has.”

Walter glanced at Joe, made the briefest face, then said, “Why is that, since, as far as we know, you aren’t related and he was never a friend of the family?”

“Better for him if he had been. Might not have been telling people how to run their lives since the day he was born.” Rosanna scowled. Joe went over and kissed her on the forehead. The argument subsided. Minnie, who had left Mrs. Frederick napping and only come by for a minute, took her plate of food and ran home. Lois and Claire set the dining-room table.

Maybe if Walter hadn’t been tired and irritated from the tractor mishap, the argument would have been over, but just at the wrong time, that time when they had all finished their first helpings and
were thinking about seconds, when Rosanna stood up, lifted the carving knife and fork, and directed her gaze at the roast, Walter said, “I think Wallace should have been president instead of vice-president. I like him better than Truman. He knows some things, he’s thought about things. Truman is a hothead.”

“Yes, and if he was from Independence, Iowa, rather than Independence, Missouri, he would be fine with you.”

Joe wasn’t sure he had ever heard his parents argue about politics, especially with slightly raised voices. He and Lillian exchanged a glance. Henry said, “My science teacher said that they didn’t find any radiation at Hiroshima, and that the Japanese lied about it.”

“What are you talking about that at school for?” said Rosanna.

“We’ve talked about it Friday and today. Two girls were crying, so he told them that. He said that there were five buildings left standing and a hundred thousand people died. There was one building pretty far away, and the blast was so hot that the chairs inside the house were scorched through the closed windows. It was five thousand degrees.”

“And Henry Wallace wants to let the Russians do that very thing!” exclaimed Rosanna.

Lillian said, “I can’t believe telling the girls those things made them feel better. I don’t want to think about it, and I’m glad it’s not my business.”

Henry said, “He said that, even at our age, it’s better to know about something than to imagine it all the time.”

Joe said, “Happy birthday, Lillian.” Everyone shut up, and after a short silence, Claire told about the rabbit Miss Rohrbaugh had at school. It was gray, not white, but it had white tips on its ears. Its name was Paul, not Peter, and each of the nine children at school would have a turn feeding it—in alphabetical order. “I am ‘L,’ ” said Claire.

When he was walking to his place that evening, carrying the remains of the cake, Joe didn’t know what to think. His main feeling about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been surprise mixed with a sense of relief. His main feeling about Henry Wallace was more like his dad’s than his mom’s—someone in Washington had to be a nice guy, and Wallace had that Iowa way of doing it, draft horse rather than Thoroughbred. He looked around. The sky was
clear; the corn was certainly drying in the fields, and maybe, if he paused and stood still, he could hear it. But he had seen the picture of the mushroom cloud, and in spite of what Henry’s teacher had said, he could imagine it rising above Usherton—a mile high, was it?—achingly bright and loud. Would that be the last thing you would see? Was that the last thing someone like himself on a street in Hiroshima did see? Joe prayed a little prayer—may he not have known what he was looking at, may he have vanished from this earth the very moment he turned his head and said, “What in the world is that?”

LILLIAN WAS WORKING
late. It was just about time for the soda fountain to close—she was wiping down the counter—and here he came, in the door, stepping aside for Charlie, who was picking up one of the displays, and then over to her. He had on a camel-hair coat and was carrying a brown leather briefcase. His hat was pushed back a little, as if he were ready for anything. He set the briefcase and his hat on one stool and sat down on another one. His smile was quick. He said, “Where am I?”

“Usherton, Iowa.”

“What time is it?”