With Every Letter (2 page)

“Oh please, Philomela? Please? It’s only one letter.”

Mellie lifted her head. Outside the window, the horizon beckoned. “One letter,” she whispered.

“One letter.” Mellie groaned. The blank sheet of airmail stationery taunted her. “Lord, what can I say?”

In the hallway, a group of nurses squealed and giggled. Mellie peeked around the post of her bunk. The ladies hooked arms and strolled away, laughing and chatting, off to some fun activity.

Longing tugged at her chest. She set aside the stationery and stroked the worn burgundy cover of the scrapbook she used as a writing surface. On the black pages inside lay her childhood friends, who had kept her company on countless lonely days at home and abroad. She flipped through, and her friends offered paper smiles just for her, paper ears to listen, and paper eyes that accepted her.

Children from magazines, catalogs, and newspaper articles. They’d never played hopscotch with her or whispered their secrets to her.

A thin substitute for friendship, but it was all she’d ever had. Overseas, she’d been the only child on Papa’s expeditions. Stateside, the boys and girls found her odd and foreign.

Halfway through the scrapbook, the faces shifted from children she had needed to children who needed her.

The first, a little fair-haired boy, had started her mission of mercy. His mother stood behind him, one arm clutched around his shoulders, her face angled to the side, chin high and brave and fearsome. The boy wore short pants and a little jacket. One foot toed in. One hand grasped his mother’s forearm around him, the other hung limp by his side. With his chin dipped, he looked at the newspaper photographer as if his life had been stripped from him.

It had. His father had just been sentenced to death for murder.

The nation cheered. No one cared about the boy. So Mellie cut his picture out of the newspaper, pasted it in her scrapbook, and prayed for him.

Others followed. A hollow-eyed little girl with stringy blonde hair, riding an overloaded jalopy from the Oklahoma dust bowl to points unknown. A colored boy blinded by a fire, his eyes swathed in bandages. A Filipino girl, her face disfigured by a tropical disease.

Mellie prayed for them every day. While the other children had provided a sense of companionship, these children provided her with purpose. What if she was the only person praying for them? Even in her isolation, she could still extend mercy.

She glanced at the empty sheet of stationery on her bed.

Across the ocean, perhaps another young man needed her. What if a letter could ease his fears or worries or loneliness? What if her prayers could strengthen him?

What if he wrote back?

Mellie’s breath caught. On paper it wouldn’t matter if she were a rose or an orchid. Perhaps a friendship could develop, still a paper friendship, but more than she’d ever had before.

“Lord, give me the right words.” She set the stationery on top of her scrapbook and put pen to paper.

2

HMS
Derbyshire
Liverpool, England
October 24, 1942

Lt. Thomas MacGilliver Jr. prepared to walk the plank.

“Ahoy there, mateys.” Tom stood on the superstructure of the British transport ship and grinned. Below him on the deck, the men in his platoon gaped and laughed. He turned to Privates Earl Butler and Conrad Davis behind him. “Got it?”

“Sure thing, Gill.” Butler clamped the four-inch pipe under his beefy arm and gripped it in his hands. The length of pipe crossed the metal railing for the superstructure and stretched over the deck ten feet below.

“Hey, boss!” Private Bill Rinaldi stood beside Butler. “You’re going swimming with the sharks.”

“Yeah. Watch out for those English sharks. On a ship.” Tom climbed the railing, held on to it, and arranged his bare feet on the pipe. The rough texture from corrosion in the salty air would help him keep his footing. He stretched his arms wide and slowly rose to standing.

Mumbled praise built into a low chorus, and Tom smiled. The men needed a diversion. Any day now the U.S. 908th Engineer Aviation Battalion would sail to North Africa for
Operation Torch, although only the officers knew the destination. In a few weeks, the men would know the taste of battle.

“This, boys, is what a cantilever bridge is like.” He stepped forward like a tightrope walker, curling his feet around the rusty pipe. Another step and the murmurs grew. His construction work on Pittsburgh’s bridges to put himself through engineering school had paid off. “The bridge can handle my load because Butler and Davis provide a counterweight. Imagine another segment coming from the other direction toward me, also balanced by a counterweight. Where the two segments meet, you only need a pin to join them.”

He stepped to within a foot of the end, his arms outstretched, and gazed down at the laughing crowd. Everywhere, always a laughing crowd. But never a friend.

Tom cleared his throat and flung a smile back on his face. “As long as you do your calculations and get the right counterweight—and Butler’s got plenty of that . . .”

Hoots and hollers rewarded him.

“Hey, Gill!” Rinaldi called from behind him. “Did you calculate that Butler’s ticklish as a little girl?” He wiggled his fingers near Butler’s thick midsection.

“Don’t!” Tom squatted and grabbed the pipe. “No, Rinaldi. Don’t!”

The pipe wobbled as Butler edged away from his friend. “Don’t, or I’ll—”

“Should have thought of that before you dumped salt in my coffee.” Rinaldi jabbed Butler in the ribs.

The pipe lurched to the side and broke Tom’s grip. He grasped for it, but it bounced away. He dropped to the deck, banging his hip and his shoulder.

The men howled with laughter. Tom hoisted himself to his feet and rubbed his sore hip. He’d get a bruise, but it was worth it.

Someone pulled the plug in the basin of laughter, and it all drained away. Tom turned to face Capt. Dick Newman, commander of Company B of the 908th. Tom saluted. “Captain.”

“Lieutenant.” Newman’s dark eyes took in the scene. “Another engineering lesson?”

“Yes, sir. Someone’s got to educate these lumps.”

“A little less education, a little more discipline.” But the corner of the captain’s mouth flicked up. He stepped to the side and motioned to the man behind him. “Just assigned a new man to your platoon, Staff Sergeant Larry Fong.”

“Hey! What’s a Jap doing here?” That voice—Tom’s platoon sergeant, Hal Weiser.

Tom settled a smile on Weiser. “Fong’s a Chinese name, not Japanese. The Chinese are our Allies, remember? And the sergeant’s an American.”

“Three generations, sir.” Sergeant Fong wore a bright smile. He had some height to him, matching Tom’s five foot ten.

Tom extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Sergeant. Welcome to the platoon.”

Fong shook his hand. “Thank you, Lieutenant . . . ?”

The moment suspended in air, the always-too-brief moment when Tom could be one of the guys. Before they knew his name. Mom was right when she discouraged him from changing his name—lying would be wrong—but he still wished he were someone else.

He set his face in the proper cheerful expression. “Lt. Tom MacGilliver.”

The sergeant’s eyebrows popped up in recognition.

Captain Newman set his hand on Fong’s shoulder. “The sergeant will take Weiser’s place as platoon sergeant, and Weiser will take Duke’s squad, since Duke’s in the hospital and won’t join our excursion. Fong had a couple years of
engineering school at the University of California before he got called up. That’s why I put him with you, Gill.”

Tom’s grin widened. “Cal, huh? I went to the University of Pittsburgh. We can pick each other’s brains.”

“Sorry, sir. I didn’t get past my lower division work. But after the war—can’t wait to get back. In the meantime, on-the-job training.”

“Great. Glad you’re in my platoon.” He motioned for the sergeant to come with him and set a path down the starboard side of the ship. He could think of several reasons for the captain’s decision, the least of which was to put the engineering student with the graduate engineer. Chinese or not, the sergeant wouldn’t be accepted in authority over a squad. And Tom’s platoon served as the dumping place for men the other two platoon commanders in the company didn’t want. The misfit platoon.

A brisk breeze snaked by, and Sergeant Fong held on to his garrison cap. “Say, Lieutenant, that’s a bum rap of a name. Just like MacGilliver the Killiver.”

Thank goodness Tom had years of experience smiling over the pain. “He was my father.”

“Your . . . I’m sorry, sir.”

“He left when I was five and was gone when I was seven. Barely knew him. And I take after my mother. Completely harmless.”

“Of course. I never—I didn’t mean—”

“So what field of engineering are you interested in? I’m in civil.”

Fong’s face relaxed a bit. “Electrical, sir.”

“Good.” Tom nodded and leaned on the ship’s railing. He gazed around the estuary of the Mersey River, where dozens of British and American transports anchored, holding the Eastern and Center forces for the invasion of Algeria. The
Western force would sail straight from the U.S. to French Morocco.

“That would be a good place for a bridge.” He pointed northwest to where the Mersey narrowed between Liverpool and Wallasey. “A suspension bridge. The towers and cables would resemble sails, honor Liverpool’s nautical history.”

The sergeant frowned. “Isn’t there a tunnel under the river?”

Tom rearranged his arms on the ship’s railing. “Tunnels are so . . . impersonal, hiding underground as if the two sides were ashamed to associate with each other. Bridges are visible, personal, proud to make the connection.”

Larry squinted at the empty space over the river. “Yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean.”

The design flew together in Tom’s head. “I want to build bridges all over the world, connect people and places.”

“Great goal, sir.”

“Mm-hmm.” If only he could build a bridge between himself and one other human being.

Gray and white images flickered on the screen in the ward room as Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan bantered in
The Shop Around the Corner
.

No one displayed rage and anguish and depression like Jimmy Stewart. Through his acting, Tom could feel those emotions without risk, the tightened muscles, the quickened pulse, the drooping face. Mom said movies were a safe outlet. Movies and prayer. Tom never missed a chance for either.

And Jimmy Stewart displayed plenty of emotion in this film. An underpaid store manager, unappreciated by his boss, found love in an anonymous letter exchange, only to find that the woman he’d grown to love was actually the obnoxious
clerk he parried with every day. Only in Hollywood could that come to a happy ending, but it did, with a kiss and a crescendo of music and a fade to black.

The tail end of the film whap-whap-whapped in the projector, and Tom jumped up to still the reel.

The thirty officers of the battalion shifted in their seats, ready to leave, but Captain Newman stood and held up a hand. “Excuse me, gentlemen. That’s not all. Please be seated.”

Tom settled back into his chair.

“With Lieutenant Colonel Black’s permission . . .” Newman nodded to the commanding officer of the 908th. “I have an invitation for you.”

He put one foot on a chair and raised a sheepish smile. With his square face and dark good looks, he could be in a movie himself. “This is my wife’s idea. Personally, I think it’s corny, but my wife’s a beautiful woman, so what can I say?”

Tom joined in the men’s laughter.

“This movie inspired her. She charmed the nurses in her charge to write letters to you oafs. Anonymous letters, like in the movie.”

He held up a stack of envelopes. “You each get one letter. You can reply or not, your choice. If you do, play by my wife’s rules, or she’ll make my life miserable. No names, no pictures, and no personal details—hometown, people’s names, anything like that.”

Tom sat up taller, and his mouth drifted open. If he were in an actual movie, a shaft of light would have pierced the deck of the ship and landed on him.