Dream When You're Feeling Blue (16 page)

“I
DON’T FEEL LIKE GOING TO A DANCE
any more than the man in the moon.” Kitty sat at the edge of the bed, rubbing her feet. She’d taken a shower in cold water, hoping the unpleasant jolt would wake her up, but it was no good: she was still thoroughly beat, and now she was freezing, too. She understood the need for oil to be conserved at home so that it could go toward fuel for the boys. But because she had taken a cold shower in the middle of November to wake up and do her part as a morale booster at a USO dance (in addition to doing her part as a defense worker!), she was sitting inside her own house shivering, unable to get warm. When the temperature was kept at sixty-five degrees, keeping warm at any time was hard to do. But now!

Besides that, she was working harder than ever in the factory; there was a mania to get things done and get them done even more quickly than before. The Italian surrender had helped throw everyone into high gear. Hitler was reportedly depressed and staring silently into his soup; Himmler had set up a special SS team to destroy evidence of the mass murder of Jews; new offensives had been launched in the Pacific. Everyone was galvanized, but there was a price to be paid: she and Hattie were often so tired at lunch they hardly spoke. When Hattie’s birthday had come last week and Kitty had given her false fingernails as a joke, neither of them had laughed. Instead, Hattie had started crying, and then Kitty had, too. They’d both been embarrassed. Ruined hands did not in any way compare with the ultimate, horrifying sacrifices the men were making, Kitty knew that, and she felt guilty for complaining. Still, at such times she also remembered her father’s words about the hurt finger not hurting less because of someone else’s more seriously injured arm. She’d offered a hankie to Hattie and told her to come on, she’d buy her a Coke. Hattie had said fine, she’d buy one for Kitty.

“Don’t go to the dance, then,” Tish said, pinching her cheeks to raise some color. “Louise is coming; she can ‘chaperone.’”

“I’m not so sure I should go, either,” Louise said. “After what happened last time.”

Louise had danced with a young man from Boise who made Fred Astaire look like an amateur. Also, his looks reminded her of Michael, and when he’d held her close during “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” she’d closed her eyes and imagined that it was indeed Michael holding her. Then, to her horror—for the girls were there above all else to cheer up the soldiers—she’d started crying. When the boy had pulled back from her and asked her what was wrong, she’d confessed that she’d been pretending he was Michael. He’d told her that was all right, he’d been pretending she was his wife. He had a young wife and a little son, only six weeks old when he left. And then Louise had begun to cry harder, thinking of how that baby might never know his father. The man had told her not to worry, he wasn’t scared, all his life he’d been a very lucky fellow. “Tell you what,” he’d told her. “When I get home I’ll send you a sign. Four four-leaf clovers—I’m always finding them everywhere I go. And then you’ll know that the lucky man you danced with got home safe and sound.” Louise had disobeyed the rules and given him her address. It didn’t seem to be so much of a risk—the men in his unit were taking the train out the next morning.

“Oh, let’s both go,” Kitty told Louise. “I’ll dance; you do something else. Why don’t you help the guys make records to send home?”

“That’s dangerous,” Louise said. “You never know when a guy’s going to send a record to a girl who sent him a Dear John letter. That’s even worse than the guys who are telling their parents they’re coming home amputees. I don’t see how anyone could do that, send a guy who’s fighting a war a Dear John letter. What kind of person would be so cruel? At least wait until he gets home! I’ll come to the club. I’ll just serve coffee again.”

Kitty didn’t want to go to the Kelly Club, but she didn’t want to stay at home, either—what was there to do at home but go to bed early? She’d had enough of that. Despite her fatigue, she was young, she wanted to do things. And she wanted a man to look at her
that way.
Surely all women did. There were rumors that flew around at the factory about married women who were apparently having relations with men there as well as outside the factory. One such woman, a thirtyish redhead named Dellrene, had admitted openly that she wasn’t going to deny herself. She’d told Kitty, “What he don’t know won’t hurt him. I got needs. And don’t tell me he ain’t helping himself to whatever he can find. When he comes home, we’ll be with each other. For now…” She’d shrugged. “It’s war, honey.”

Another reason to go to the dance was that, so far as Kitty was concerned, Tish needed two chaperones. She was always on the verge of getting in trouble; she was a terrible flirt. She was doing very well at her job, and any money she didn’t give to the family went toward clothes or the fabric to make them. She loved showing off her Charmode dress-up frock, with its figure-molding drapery, and her whirl skirt in fine rayon crepe, and her pleated dress with an elongated bodice and lowered waistline. Kitty had a few new things as well, her favorite being a classic line dress with a shirred bodice and jeweled buttons, but it didn’t feel the same to dress up when your fingers were callused, your face too thin, your hair dry from overshampooing.

“Girls?”
their mother called, and in her voice was such panic that all three of them raced down the stairs.

There’s a fire!
Kitty thought, and she sniffed at the air and worried about where the rest of her family was. Why hadn’t she gotten dressed faster? Now she’d have to go outside barefoot and in her robe.

But there was no fire. Instead, there was Tommy, lying white-faced in his mother’s arms, his eyes closed, something dark caked at the corners of his mouth.

AFTER THEIR PARENTS AND THEIR BROTHERS
left Tommy’s hospital bedside, the sisters took their turns and pulled their chairs up closer to him. He had been tentatively diagnosed with a digestive disorder, and though the doctor thought he would be fine, he would not be coming home for a while. True to his nature, he’d complained about nothing. He lay still with his hair wetly combed—Margaret’s doing—and with Frank’s wristwatch huge on his arm. A transfusion was running, and squeamish Tish pointedly turned her back to the bottle of blood. “Did you meet any cute girls in here yet?” she asked.

Tommy smiled. “No.”

“Well, keep your eyes open,” Tish said. “I think there might be cute girls running around here.”

“Can you bring them in to meet me?” Tommy asked, and then Tish had to stop smiling. “I was just kidding, hon,” she said.

Tommy said gravely, “Me, too, sis,” and Tish laughed.

“Want me to bring you some ice cream tomorrow?” Kitty asked him.

“That’s okay, I’m not so hungry.”

“When you come home, then,” Kitty said, and the words reverberated inside her head.
When you come home.
It was funny; with all that was going on with the war overseas, these domestic trials seemed outrageous, a kind of bitter insult. Michael’s mother dying. Tommy seriously ill. But nothing in nature stopped in deference to anything else. In apology for it. For the sake of some kind of balance. Kitty thought of a film she once saw where an antelope ran from a lion. Its head was high, its dark eyes wide in panic. Then it was down, being eaten alive. That antelope, on that day. Nearby, a mix of other animals drank from a great pond, watchful, wary, but mostly just thirsty. Was human nature so different from animal nature? Or nature nature? How did one find sense in anything? How did one find comfort?

Kitty leaned over to kiss Tommy’s forehead. He still smelled like a little boy sometimes. He smelled of pencils and lunch meat and clean sweat. “I love you,” she told him. There. That was how to find comfort.

Louise leaned over and spoke quietly to her little brother. “I’m going to tell Michael to send a letter just for you,” she told him. “Would you like that?”

He nodded happily.

“Want one from Julian, too?” Kitty asked.

“Yes.”

“Want one from a whole
bunch
of guys?” Tish asked. “And one of them is a really good artist who draws really funny pictures?” Kitty knew the Army flier Tish meant. He was stationed in England, and he’d sent a drawing of Churchill smoking a cigar the size of himself.

“Yes,” Tommy said and yawned, and the sisters gathered up their coats and purses. Their parents would come in one more time, and then the family would go home, minus one.

O
N MONDAY, HATTIE MET KITTY
for lunch at the corner table of the employee cafeteria. There was something different about Hattie, something wrong. She wouldn’t look directly at Kitty, and in place of her usual chattiness, there was a heavy silence. She sat staring at her lunch bag, refusing to meet Kitty’s eyes. Kitty touched her hand. “Hattie? Is everything all right?”

Finally, “I have to tell you something,” Hattie said.

Kitty stopped unwrapping the waxed paper from around her sandwich. “Did Will…?”

Hattie nodded. Two tears slid down her face, and she hastily wiped them off.

Kitty reached across the table for Hattie’s hand. “Oh, Hattie. I’m so sorry. When did you find out?”

“His mama wrote me. I got the letter Saturday. It’s funny; I knew, soon as I saw the envelope. We’d been writing, she and I. But I knew this was going to be the letter telling me that he got killed.” Hattie looked at the employees all around her, talking, laughing, smoking. At the table next to them was Arlene Burns, whose son was a Navy flier and had just been written up in the paper. Sitting with her was Luddie Stevenson, who’d returned from Guadalcanal completely deaf in one ear and was always cocking his head like a puppy to hear you better, and Tiny Hermon, who was mildly retarded and anything but tiny. You could always count on Tiny to help you lift things.

“Sure took a while to find out,” Hattie said. “There I was, getting up every morning thinking I was one day closer to being back with him. Writing him every night. I used to get all dressed up to write him, isn’t that silly? Used to put a dress on, and my lipstick, my high-heeled shoes. Just like a date. I put his picture next to me, turned on the radio, and wrote him everything I could think of.” She smiled and shook her head. “He was one handsome man, old Will Duncan. I wish you’d met him.”

“I do, too,” Kitty said. Her throat hurt. She wanted to go home.

“And he wrote me such nice letters. Romantic, but also just
nice.
He’d say things ’bout how he missed oranges, that little spray when he first dug in to peel them, that scent. Said he missed the sounds of his neighborhood, the little kids skipping rope, old Mrs. Dooley leaning out her window in her nightgown and yelling for her cat, sounding for all the world
like
a cat the way she yowled, but he missed it. I fell in love with him from those letters, it’s how I got to really know him. I remember thinking. Well, who wants a war, but how else would I have ever gotten these precious words? I thought after the war was over, we’d all get together. You and Julian and me and Will. It was a surprise I was saving for all of us. I had a big dinner planned, I was going to play music and serve dinner, and we’d eat and we’d dance…. I wish I’d told Will about it. I had the whole menu planned, I’d asked him once what his favorite foods were, and he gave me this big long list—Lord! But I was going to make every single thing he told me, from catfish to hot dogs to strawberry shortcake to buttered noodles, and I was going to invite you and Julian, and we were going to celebrate the end of the war and the beginning of…

“Well, I didn’t really know, see. I didn’t know for sure. I think me and Will were perfect together, and I guess I just thought we’d get married. We’d have the kids and the house and…” She looked at Kitty. “You do that, dream in your mind ’bout all you and Julian going to do after the war? Do you see everything just so clear?”

Kitty nodded. “All the time.”

Hattie stared into her lap. “I knew the house we’d live in like it was a real thing out there, just waiting for us, the door cracked open. I knew how it would feel when we were lying in bed together every morning.” She looked up sharply at Kitty, and her voice turned hard. “I wish I’d done more with him. I wish I had done everything. Those people that tell you to wait? They’re wrong. Because now I’ll never know what…I’ll never know.”

Kitty wanted to tell Hattie that she had been better off not doing more. That there would be another man for her, in time. That then she would be glad she had waited. But what she said was “I know.” Then she asked, “So…are you going to stay here?”

Hattie nodded and opened her lunch bag. “I’m going to stay here. Least until a better idea comes along. I’m going to build me a plane kill a bunch of Nazis dead.” She pulled out a sandwich and an apple and stared at them. “I don’t guess I’m so hungry. Would you like my lunch?”

“You need to eat, Hattie,” Kitty told her gently.

“I know you’re right.” Hattie took a bite of her apple. “It’s good,” she said. “You know, I just feel so bad about how good it is.” She dropped the apple, put her hands to her face, and began to cry, and Kitty moved her chair to shield her friend from the stares of their co-workers. She put her arm around Hattie’s shoulders and rocked her. Rocked them both.

THAT NIGHT, ON THE WAY HOME FROM WORK,
Kitty miraculously found a seat on the streetcar. She stared out the window, noticing all the fringed flags in all the windows that were decorated with blue stars, one for each person from that house who was in the service. One flag had three stars, and Kitty imagined what it would be like to have all her brothers gone. She looked especially for gold stars tonight, gold stars for those buried at home or at sea or in foreign soil, those men who’d waved jauntily from departing trains and jitterbugged at USO clubs, those who would never again hear the sounds of their neighbors, or kiss their girlfriends, or pet their dogs, or father children, or breathe in the scent of an orange. Gold stars for those men barely old enough to shave, who had written wills specifying the disposition of their few things.
I want Dad to have my camera.
A soldier she’d once danced with had told her that you never hear the sound of the shell that kills you. She hoped that was true.