The Search for Joyful (4 page)

“Hitler's pouring in mechanized troops,” Georges confronted us, as though we had something to do with it. “And how do the Poles fight back? With horses! Can you see it? Horses charging tanks.”

Mama didn't argue, that wasn't her way. “We already fought one war for democracy and found out it was for the perpetuation of the British Empire.”

Georges managed a laugh. “There speaks our Irish mama.”

The news supported Georges. France and England declared war.

Canada was at war a week later, although Prime Minister Mackenzie King assured us that Canada's role would be for the defense of North America. England could fend for herself. We, along with the United States, would be chief suppliers, but that would be the extent of our participation.

Headlines repeated the P.M.'s promise: NO CONSCRIPTION. “It's a relief to know that no Canadian boys will be sent overseas,” Mama Kathy said.

Georges felt differently.

I argued that once the troops of the British Expeditionary Force confronted them, the Germans would be brought to heel. At the same time an irrational fear gripped me that Germany would make an end run around France and somehow rise up off our coast at Nova Scotia.

I listened to Connie and Georges debate, a rare instance because the twins were consistently on the same side in all their opinions. This time I sensed Connie was afraid.

I read the papers and was glued to the radio. Prices zoomed out of sight. We planted a victory garden. Free seed was distributed—lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and carrots. The corn was put in at some distance, because Mama Kathy insisted it impoverished the soil. In spite of these efforts, there were shortages of everything, including good news.

While I watered the garden, there were sightings of periscopes off the Atlantic coast, and an eight-year-old girl was killed in her bed by a lobbed shell. My fear no longer seemed irrational.

The North Atlantic became a hunting ground for U-boats. The liner
Athenia
was sunk by German submarines, the carrier
Courageous
lost, and the battleship
Royal Oak.
Georges made notes in the margin of his map.

The Germans didn't attempt to breach the Maginot Line. They swarmed through the Low Countries and dropped parachutists, half of which were dummies brought to add to the confusion.

France held out a month. In one of the greatest sea rescues in history, every English boat from the royal yacht to fishing smacks cooperated in evacuating 340,000 British, French, and Belgian troops through Dunkirk and other Channel ports.

Paris was declared an open city. The Germans walked in without firing a shot. On the radio we heard Churchill announce that Britain would fight on alone. “This is our finest hour,” he said, while London was being pummeled by dive bombers. He vowed to defend the city street by street and house by house. Children and the aged were dispatched to the countryside. England was crying in the night.

Mama Kathy quietly joined the Ladies' Defense Society and began knitting socks. Evenings we huddled around our radio and looked at each other bleakly. For the first time it was conceivable England might lose the war.

“This is it,” Georges said, “I've had it with sitting on the sidelines.”

We three women, Mama Kathy, Connie, and I, stared at him mutely. He left for Ottawa right after Sunday services to join the RAF. But Saturday evening to cheer us up he gave a farewell magic show.

That brought back the famous magic show when I was seven. Georges rigged a curtain, one of Mama Kathy's blankets, strung on a wire along the living-room rafters. And he gave me a part. I was to open the curtain in the beginning and in the end draw it. We rehearsed all week. The day of the performance Old Bill came and played his Irish bagpipes. Mama baked cookies, which she passed around. Papa's contribution was to applaud. He was an enthusiastic applauder. He showed us how to cup our hands to make twice the noise. And if you jump to your feet and clap your hands over your head, it makes for a deafening ovation, especially if you add cries of Bravo!

I was seized by stage fright and when the time came for me to close the curtain, I pulled the wrong way. Of course I was only pretending to pull. Connie was actually making it move, which it did—the other way.

A huge laugh from the audience made me realize my mistake. I had ruined the show. Disgraced and in tears, I ran from the room.

Georges was after me in a flash and took me in his arms.

“It's all right, Kathy. It's like the curtain is magic and goes its own way. We're going to keep that in the show from now on.”

Connie came and gave me a hug. “Are you crying because of that stupid curtain?”

“I used to be crying about that. Now I'm crying because . . . because . . .”

“Because why, honey?”

“Just because!”

She placed her cheek against mine.

This sent me into a fresh paroxysm. “Why can't I be a twin?” I wailed. “Everybody else is.”

If Georges wanted to smile, he didn't show it. “It's like this, Kathy. Most people, God gets right the first time. He did with you. He looked at you and said, ‘This is a good kid.'”

Georges, where are you? His hope of the RAF didn't work out. Myopia was enough to disqualify him. But he applied for and was accepted into officers' training, somewhere in England. Connie whispered not to worry, he wasn't in the front lines.

Connie would know. They had stayed up the night before he left reviving the Twins' Code.

THE WAR HAD been going on for two years. But it took Pearl Harbor to make me realize it was my war too. My war, because there was a push to corral the dark and dusky peoples of the world, to force them into labor camps—who knows, perhaps they were death camps. And my skin was copper.

I'd thought a good deal recently about being dark. In Germany the gypsies, along with the Jews, were rounded up, arrested, stripped of their possessions. Gypsies, because Hitler hadn't any Indians. But the civilized world couldn't allow the Nazis to declare themselves a master race and the rest slaves. Here in Canada we weren't all fair-skinned. We played and sang and worshipped in dozens of languages—French, Russian, Plattdeutsch . . . and Cree.

Only England, fighting alone, stood against this genocidal policy of the Third Reich. True, England had done its share of conquering the dark peoples, but it didn't enslave them and it didn't annihilate them.

Now that England was fighting for her life, and Canada too, I knew I had to act. Oddly enough, I knew what I would do. In some subterranean compartment of my brain I had worked it out. Without a word to anyone, not telling even Connie, I applied to a nursing program given in Montreal at the Daughters of Charity Hospital and sponsored by the Royal Canadian Army. The letter of acceptance lay in my pocket all week, while I got up courage to tell my family. After graduation I would be an army nurse and go overseas to join the war effort.

So this other self of mine, this dark, generally silent Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter, stood up at Christmas dinner 1941, under another brave little tree with its dyed loops of macaroni, Papa Mike's homemade wooden ornaments, and the store-bought angel—stood up and told her family of the personal commitment she had made.

“Montreal?” Mama's cheeks flushed, and the light caught in her red hair. “You're going to Montreal, Kathy?”

“Yes, Mama.”

Like a torpedo slipping along underwater, my announcement did not immediately explode. It was into silence I continued, “There's a serious shortage of nurses, and I've been accepted into a two-year course at the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul Hospital. It's under the auspices of the army, and when you graduate you automatically receive a commission.” I picked my words carefully. I didn't say I'd see action. But I would.

Connie was the first to recover herself. “It sounds like a marvelous opportunity.”

“But Montreal,” Mama protested. “It's a French city. To all intents and purposes, French.”

For Mama this implied gambling, drug trafficking, and worse.

“The Daughters of Charity, Mama—it's a very fine institution. Ordinarily I couldn't afford the course they offer, but it's subsidized by the army.”

“You'd come out of it a nurse and an officer?” I shot Connie a look of gratitude as she plunged on. “Just think of it, Mama, we'd have to salute her.”

“I
am
thinking of it,” Mama Kathy said, “and I know Papa would not have approved. It's sin city, Kathy. That's what he always said, full of vice, and as a Mountie he was in a position to know.”

I didn't say anything. Although I could have said that he was the one who told me I would make a good nurse in the first place.

Connie intervened in her older sister way, as though she somehow sat above the fray, “This is the first time since the world was made that women are being called, asked to help, to be part of things.”

“You're right about that,” Mama agreed, and then made what I considered a concession. “It would mean pulling up stakes. And,” she added with asperity, “it would mean Montreal.”

“They say those things about any city, Mama.”

“Not about Boston they don't.”

Boston was where Mama was born.

“A nurse,” Connie mused. “How long have you been thinking about it?”

“Since the beginning of the war, really.”

“A nurse,” Mama echoed, by which I knew she was thinking about it too. Then, “There must be a lot of wounded to patch together.”

I jumped up from my place to hug her.

 
THESE WERE THE skeins responsible for my being on this silver and blue train, speeding toward what would be my life. Each taut thread played its part, but I wondered if it wasn't Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter who gave me the courage to actually be on it. It was six years from Papa's death, and the whole world had to dissolve in chaos, blow itself apart. Clark and Iba Airfields in the Philippines had to be taken out, British air power in Hongkong destroyed, Bangkok occupied, Malaya invaded, Burma seized, Canadian boys in Hongkong made to surrender to the Japanese, and of course Pearl Harbor—for me to be sitting primly in a coach of the Canadian Pacific, looking out the window while the silver train streaked by farms, forests, lakes, and towns, the speed flattening the earth and carrying me into my dream.

I was convinced Papa knew about the dream. At the moment of death you must see things, know things that otherwise you don't.

Classes started in less than a week. The future was open as it never had been. Connie was right, it had become a different world, where girls were encouraged to go into the workplace, share in opportunities. A career as a nurse allowed me to be on my own, take charge of my life. It was time.

I straightened in my seat, while the Canadian countryside framed itself in my window, and investigated the box lunch Mama Kathy had packed. She must have used her own ration coupons because there was a chicken sandwich. I munched with a sense of well-being.

That night I went to sleep in a reclined Pullman chair with a white doily under my head and my shoes kicked off. The porter came by with a pillow and a thin gray blanket. The engines pulsed through me; I fell asleep and woke to the sound of the rails. Sleepily I put up the window blind and was shocked to see a pressing blackness.

We had entered a tunnel. Across from me two women exchanged stories about the tunnels they hated all over the world, the worst being the New York subway under the East River. The one we were in was under Mont-Royal, a long way from fresh air and blue sky. I also did not care for tunnels.

We emerged, and there it was, stretching in every direction . . . Montreal. I looked out on broad streets, which, in spite of gas rationing, were crowded with automobiles and stolid horses pulling ice wagons, milk carts, and bread trucks. Mainly it was alive with people. I had never seen so many people. A sense of energy seemed to fill them, and they moved to a quick rhythm.

A porter came through the cars singing out, “Montreal, Montreal! Ladies and gentlemen,
mesdames et messieurs.
” I was thrilled by the French even though it was all I could do to count to twenty and puzzle my way through irregular verbs. We circled the city, approaching the station through Ouest Montreal.

The train slowed. With a last look to make sure I hadn't left anything, I squeezed into the crowded aisle and moved forward. We pulled in to Windsor Station. I stepped down portable iron stairs and caught my breath.

In school I'd pored over illustrations of the Taj Mahal and St. Peter's in Rome, but this was the most magnificent building I'd ever seen with my own eyes. A palace for trains. Elegant covered sheds for embarking and disembarking. Lofty ceilings. Commodious waiting rooms, spacious restaurants, busy offices. The concourse was like a Roman temple, with fluted columns and ornamented capitals.

And people, people everywhere, rushing, strolling, pushing, waiting in line, talking, yelling in a dozen languages. Soldiers, sailors, officers of every rank and service. Young women being kissed and kissing, both hello and goodbye. Nuns and priests robed in brown, white, gray, some wearing scarlet sashes. Children racing around, playing improvised games in all this turmoil, one lost and shrieking for his parents, another methodically banging her brother's head on the marble floor.

Some of the women were clearly not passengers. With carmine lips and matching fingernails they approached unattached males. Sin city.

I was looking for the exit, when the crowd carried me to a cigarette stand, an edifice with its own fake Roman columns and cornices. It purveyed nuts, dried fruit, gum, candy, cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, knickknacks, gifts, magazines, newspapers, travelers' kits. While I stood there taking it all in, I heard someone ask for a pack of Juicy Fruit, please. I was transfixed. His voice reverberated like bass organ pipes. It was unmistakeable. I looked around. Paul Robeson, Old Man River himself.