Rumors of Peace (5 page)

B
EHIND
Sheriff O'Toole's office a model air raid shelter had been completed. I went down inside and looked. It was snug and clean, but somehow seemed a worse place to die in than a cellar. By the train depot there now stood a hastily constructed USO canteen. The Native Daughters of the Golden West passed out sandwiches and coffee, and from the windows you could hear “Don't Get Around Much Anymore” and “That Old Black Magic” blaring from the jukebox. Mr. Nagai's flower shop, painted and redecorated, had reopened under a new sign: “Modern Miss Apparel.” On May 6, Corregidor fell.

But the fullness of spring gathered as always. For weeks the sky had been a hard blue, and the breeze was cool. Now the sky softened, the wind vanished, the air hung hot and fragrant. Trees rustled green and heavy. Above the calm, glassy bay the hills loomed emerald green.

At school sweaters were pulled off and tied around waists. Then they were gone for good, along with pounds of hair, for everyone seemed to have had his or her hair cut, the girls' shorn straight and clean high across the neck, and the boys' clipped so close their ears stood out. Bare-necked, bare-armed, I felt a rippling freshness on my exposed skin. In the backyard, I helped Peter and Karla plant a victory garden.

All at once the Saturday matinees showed nothing but war films, ranging from
The Commandos Strike at Dawn
to
Abbott and Costello Join the Navy.
Clark Gable and Victor Mature were in uniform. Even Elsie the cow's husband Elmer wore an overseas cap. Classmates' older brothers and cousins disappeared from soda fountains and jalopies, leaving behind blue stars in windows. Windows were filled with all sorts of information: “Block Warden” and “We Buy War Bonds!” and “Quiet, Please, War Worker Sleeping.” In car windows there were pasted gas-rationing coupons and stickers saying “Give 'em a Lift!” and “Dim Lights After Dark!” At school we wrote essays on What America Means to Me. We bought defense stamps. We turned in big balls of collected tinfoil. In music class we kept to the patriotic strains of “America the Beautiful” and “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” adding more raucously at recess “I'm Gonna Slap a Dirty Little Jap.” Housing tracts mushroomed through the county. The stores downtown were crowded, though there was a shortage of zippers, alarm clocks, soap, fountain pens, boxed candy, even of matchbooks. Everywhere you saw people use wooden kitchen matches to light their Fleetwoods, a new and apparently dissatisfying brand that had sprung up in the absence of Camels and Chesterfields. Everyone had money to burn; but sugar, coffee, and butter were a luxury, and you stood in line at the market with your little green ration book and carried your groceries home in the same paper bag until it fell apart. Dresses were suddenly short and skimpy, with no pockets or ruffles, to conserve cloth. In place of nylon stockings, women covered their legs with tan makeup and drew on black seams with eyebrow pencil. But more often they wore pants called slacks. They worked in shipyards and defense plants. Some of them lived alone, their husbands having been drafted, and with greasy wrenches they repaired their own cars, and with hoes and mowers they cut down the lush spring grass in their backyards and planted victory gardens.

We planted beans, potatoes, and spinach. I liked working with the black pungent clods, pressing the seeds down. I envisioned the first frail shoots and then the sudden springing forth of foliage, surely a miracle. And I wondered if it was just spring that made everything seem better or if it was the fact that despite our disastrous chain of military defeats we had not yet been bombed.

It would not do to feel too sure. What the enemy banked on was our becoming relaxed, careless, as we had been before Pearl Harbor.

One day I looked at Peter and felt a shock. All at once he was tall, and he had taken to combing his hair back from his forehead with brilliantine. His nose and cheekbones had sprung into prominence; his jawline was sharper; he had a gaunt, chiseled, mysterious look.

“You don't practice anymore,” I told him.

“Practice what?”

“Your
drum.
”

“Oh, that.” All he talked about now was becoming an architect. He got a job on Saturdays selling shoes at Buster Brown's, and he put on a tweed suit and a yellow knit tie and sauntered off, pausing at the corner to light a Fleetwood. It was only too easy to picture him in uniform now; he could be one of those tall, gangling soldiers downtown on a last leave from Camp Stoneman, which was a few miles up the bay. It was where the troops were loaded onto gray carriers that plowed through the Golden Gate toward the screams and crossfire and jungle quicksand of the islands.

But Peter wouldn't be eighteen for another year, and the war might end by then. Sometimes I felt my mind leaping recklessly past the war, to all the years beyond, life streaming on and on, in sunlight, like a river. But I always pulled back. To want that, to pinpoint it, was to hang it with a bull's-eye for demolition. You had to use camouflage, even in the privacy of your own mind.

I was studying my mason jar, which was filled with mildewed oranges from which I hoped to grow penicillin.

“I really wish you'd put that out of sight,” Karla murmured, doing her homework.

“I have to check it. Anyway, what about your jar?”

She had her nylons stuffed in a jar.

“That's to
keep
them from rotting.”

“Well, these oranges have to rot.”

“Oh well,” she shrugged, and gave me a smile. “It doesn't matter.” She didn't care about my side of the room anymore because she would
be leaving soon. She would be graduating from high school in June and had won a scholarship to the Art Institute in San Francisco. In the fall she would move there.

I received a postcard from Ezio, in his huge scrawling handwriting that had to bunch up at the edge. He rode his uncle's plow horse, Mario had a big boil on his seat, so long for now. If only I could take Ezio with me into junior high school, that red-tiled palace where the girls shrieked and the boys slouched and, in spite of this mutual unattractiveness, walked with their arms around each other. My hated but familiar grammar school life was rapidly drawing to an end.

There was something I should do before leaving. During air raid drills Miss Bonder no longer pulled down the Venetian blinds against the possibility of flying glass. When I pointed this out to her, she had replied, “Thank you, Suse, but I think I know what's necessary and what's not.” I felt it my duty to report her to Sheriff O'Toole, but it seemed underhanded. Anyway, the rules all seemed to be letting up. The school drills were not as frequent as they had been, and the nighttime alarms came only every ten days or so. I was beginning to feel the passing of a crisis, as if I had suffered a violent cold that had passed from its sneeze-exploding crest to a dry, chronic chest pain, a kind of natural condition, manageable.

On the last day of school the sixth-grade classes had an orangeade party in the town park. When it was over, everyone in our class crowded around Miss Bonder to say good-bye. Even the rowdies crowded up to her side with rough good nature, and some of the girls hugged her tearfully and stood back, wiping their noses in the excitement, which was such that I too cried, “Miss Bonder, good-bye! Good-bye!” and felt we were taking leave of a saint, a supernatural being suffused with great light. But as the clamor died down and we dispersed along the streets, I felt this shining figure sink back into a tall pompadour, a sour smile, and a dangerous attitude toward Venetian blinds. Even if things were letting up, I should report her as a threat to our safety. Then suddenly it struck me that we would never be coming back to her classroom, and my concern with the Venetian blinds blew away
like smoke. It would not be me the flying glass hit.

I walked along thinking how glad I was that George Washington's drooping eyelids were gone for good. How he must have bored everyone with those eyelids. Even without him, American history was boring. What was America? Beyond California there was a haze, with the Rockies sticking out there, Chicago farther on, and New York at the end. That was more or less what I had put down in the What America Means to Me essay. Miss Bonder had written across it: “The subject is not meant to be a joke. What do you pledge allegiance to? What do you collect scrap metal for? Please rewrite.” And so I had thought more deeply and written, “I collect scrap metal to defend my family, and my house, and my backyard, the crickets in the grass, and the sow bugs under the back stairs.” This time she scrawled, “Bugs do not enter in. You do not grasp the idea.” I didn't really know why I had put down the sow bugs, except that they were under my back stairs and they belonged in my reason. And if I didn't grasp the idea, I didn't care either.

At which point I reached home, handed Mama my squalid report card, and summer officially began.

A
T NOON
Mama would roll down the shades and sit fanning herself with a newspaper. The hills glared bone white. The sidewalks hurt your eyes. You could smell the rank mud and crusted salt from the tule marsh and tomato aroma drifting in hot waves from the cannery. These smells were as fine as the smells of spring, and finest was the prickling scorch of the creek, where every summer Ezio, Mario, and I went searching for deep, clear pools. This year I climbed alone through the dry grass, narrowing my eyes for a jade green glint. Though I knew there was nothing here but a few stagnant crannies, I kept looking anyway, certain that the clear green pool lay around the next bend. But without Ezio and Mario, I wandered out early.

I would climb up in the hills, or go down to the wharf, or walk around town, looking at things. When I passed Dad's old body shop, I thought of how he used to walk to work and how he had time to eat breakfast with us in the morning and always got home from work while it was still light. The shop was an interesting place, dim and smelling of paint thinner, and Dad was always there when you dropped in. He would look up from what he was doing and smile hello and put his arm around you, and he would show you around the sanding and noisy banging, and sometimes someone would be welding, sending
up a magnificent shower of sparks. If you came by around noontime, he would wash the grease from his hands and face, and you would walk home together for lunch.

I would wander on, drift into the library, look for something to fascinate me. One day the librarian suggested
The Three Musketeers.
When I returned this two days later and asked for more like it, she gave me
The Count of Monte Cristo.
After that I downed
Les Mis
é
rables
and
Notre Dame de Paris,
enthralled by this place, France, with its furious swordfights, its mysterious sewers, its hunchbacks swinging on cathedral bells. Then, in our own bookcase at home, I came across a book called
Madame Bovary,
and though it had neither swordfights nor sewers, I liked it best of all. It had a special realness that made it possible to taste the food the people ate, to feel with their fingers the wallpaper and the bark of trees, and to smell with their nostrils the morning steam rising from rivers. In spite of Emma Bovary's incomprehensible mania for clothes and sweethearts, in spite of her terrible death, the book possessed something which only in later life did I crystallize as beauty. When I finished the last page, I started all over again.

Then something entirely unexpected happened. A six-week Red Cross swimming program for children began.

Three times a week we piled into a yellow school bus, whizzing past the ex-Jap walnut and pear orchards, past dry fields and big oaks, into dusty foothills, and then we were bouncing along a dirt road with the dust rising behind us, and Mitchell Canyon pool burst into sight, green and sparkling. The bus windows were open, and we could already smell the chlorine, and we were pushing to the door with our rolled-up towels before the bus had stopped.

For three hours we were immersed. Only occasionally did I slosh onto the wet burning cement to catch my breath as feet pounded by and screams and splashes filled the air; then I would scramble to my feet and dive back in with a whoosh of engulfing deafness, my eyes drawn to slits by the water's rush. Smooth and soundless as a fish, I swam deep inside the green-blue world, and if I looked up, I saw among the blurred, moving bodies, the sun's blaze of silver across the surface, with pale coins of light dappling down.

Blue-lipped, fingers like white raisins, we bought licorice sticks afterward at the refreshment stand and piled back into the stifling bus, where through the dust and jolting we sang:

                   
There's a place in France

                   
Where the naked women dance,

                   
And the men go around

                   
With their trousers hanging down

which ended in bursts of knowing laughter and an unfavorable look from the driver, a tough-faced lady with gray curls under a battered sun visor.

When we passed the San Ramon cutoff, I felt a wave of melancholy, remembering Ezio and Mario. And when we reached the outskirts of Mendoza, I gave thanks that it had not been bombed in our absence. Yet, with a sunburned elbow out the window and licorice sweet in my teeth, I could not find it in my happiness to linger over these things.

By the time the program was over my hair was chlorinated a rich green hue. “Sort of off-viridian,” mused Karla, who knew colors. I didn't mind. It was my badge and my memory. Plug-earred and sodden, I was content to return to my books. I remained happy.

One afternoon this happiness overcame me. I was in the backyard, doing nothing. All at once I felt my heart expand, and I swung my eyes blissfully through the yard, and I knew—not with crossed fingers, but with a clap of certainty—that nine long months had passed and we would never be bombed. I flopped down on the ground with a stunned smile and sat there with no thoughts at all, except that later on, when the shade from the house had crept across the yard, Mama and Karla would come out with a pitcher of lemonade, and we would sit at the old card table, whose top would still be brick warm from the sun.

And then a strange picture came to me. That potato-digging family lying dead in a Polish field, they must have lived in a house and sat in their yard at an old table drinking lemonade or whatever you would drink in Poland. The children must have spread their hands on the warm tabletop, and it must have felt real to them; they must have felt real to themselves, as I felt real to myself. A wave of astonishment
passed through me, a wave of disturbance; I didn't want to know this surpassingly strange thing, but the picture was growing, for the parents must have felt real too, and the people in the bombed cellars of London and Rotterdam, the soldiers lying dead in the snow with their arms sticking up like iron, and in the jungles, rotting. They had all been real inside, important. Frank Garibaldi in his green apron, coming up the steps whistling his complicated tunes, he must have been important to himself, the shining center of everything. He must have hated to die. He must have cried out and covered his eyes.

They all must have, and it was too much to know, too painful, too pitiful, too huge and boundless, and why should I have to see such a thing now, just when I knew we were safe, and I had found happiness again? I pressed my hands to my ears, as if that would squeeze me back into my happiness, but I felt like a pond when a stone has been dropped, and ripples spread out as though set in motion forever. For these terrible ripples would go on forever, would be with me forever, even if my own yard were never bombed, even if only good things happened to me for the rest of my life.