Dream When You're Feeling Blue (9 page)

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Kitty heard her father mutter. “Not enough that the mail I deliver has gotten so much heavier or that I fulfill my own duties in Civil Defense two times a week as well. No, I’ve got to do another man’s job on top of it!” But he told Margaret, “Tell him I’ll do it. But don’t be too nice about it when you do.”

“Tell him yourself if it’s nasty you’re wanting,” Margaret said and then, to her daughter, “Kitty! What’s the matter with you? Hang those shirts by their tails, not by their collars!”

Kitty looked at her father’s white shirt before her. She had indeed hung it incorrectly; her mind was not on her work. She reversed the shirt, then thought again about what she was going to tell her family at Sunday dinner tomorrow. She had decided to apply for a defense job. She knew her parents would object, and she knew all the reasons why: it wasn’t necessary; she made less money at her office job, but she made enough. It would ruin her hands. She would have to wear slacks. Women who took those kinds of jobs just weren’t quite respectable, and the men they worked with at the factories knew it: she’d be fighting off their advances all the livelong day—or evening; as it happened, Kitty wanted the swing shift for the extra twelve cents an hour. A lot of the men didn’t want you to do well; they resented your being there even though they knew the war effort needed you. She’d written to Julian about it, and he’d said he thought it was darby, so she was going to do it. If Julian had objected, that would have been one thing, but he hadn’t. He’d said, Go for the kale; those jobs will disappear when the war is over and you’ll be back to earning half as much.

She’d start with that: she’d say, Now, Julian and I have discussed this at length…. Really, she had discussed it more with Hank Cunningham, to whom she was writing more and more often; he seemed truly interested in anything she told him. He’d known some women who had built bombers in California; he’d also known some men who worked at the same factory. When she’d asked what he thought about women in defense jobs, he told her all the pros and cons he could without advising her about what to do. It seemed like a wash; she’d have to endure some hardships at a defense plant, but the benefits would make it worthwhile.

“Kitty?” Tommy said. “Can I ask you something?”

“’Course you can.”

“Is war a sin?”

He was lying in the grass, poking idly at the undersides of the sheets hung U-shaped on the line. Since he was a toddler, he’d liked lying under the sheets this way. Kitty thought she understood; there was something peaceful about it; it made your mind slow down when you watched the breeze dance with those voluptuous pieces of fabric. She hung the last shirt—properly!—and then went to lie beside her brother. He turned to look at her. “Is it?”

He had grown older overnight, it seemed, or maybe it was just that, in the hustle and bustle of their family life, Kitty rarely had time to truly see anyone she lived with. All of a sudden, her mother’s jaw had softened, or her father’s hair had thinned, or Tish was emphatically less a teenager than a beautiful woman. Looking closely at Tommy now, Kitty saw that his face had lost its childish roundness; his cheekbones and jaw were those of a young man. Her heart lurched; she felt proud, somehow, but she felt sad, too. Where had little Tommy gone? Still, so much of him always remained. From the time he was a toddler, he’d been the same kind and earnest boy. He had extraordinary patience and a bottomless generosity that no one else in the family had or even understood—Frank sometimes referred to him as the milkman’s son.

“I don’t know if you could call war a sin, exactly,” Kitty said. “It’s more complicated than that.” It
was
complicated. She’d been trying to pay more attention to the war news, confusing and depressing as it was. When Hank had asked if she’d read that article in the newspaper and she’d fibbed about it, she’d embarrassed herself. At least she wasn’t alone; Hank had also told her that the men from other countries whom he’d met had told him they were surprised at the political naïveté of American soldiers, surprised, too, at their lack of philosophical inquiry.

“But killing someone is a sin,” Tommy said. “And in war, they kill people. Every day!”

Kitty nodded. “Yes. They do.” She supposed that Tommy’s perception of the war was not all that much more sophisticated than Binks’s: one man facing another and
Bang! Bang! You’re dead!
She hoped Tommy wasn’t aware that when Hitler blitzed England, he killed 43,000 civilians. The youngest was eleven hours old. She hoped—uselessly, she supposed—her brother would never know that.

She stared up into the sky. That pure blue. Those white, white clouds. The loopy flight of the bumblebees going about their business with no interference. She and Tommy were so lucky to be lying in the grass, alive and unafraid, their uniforms the soft cotton fabrics of summer. Newspapers full of terrible headlines landed on people’s front porches every morning; but those people dressed, ate breakfast and went to work, went to visit friends, went out to eat and to dance and to church and to meetings and to weddings. The sound of bombs falling was heard only in movies, and people emerged from theaters yawning and went home to houses that were standing, to refrigerators that were full of food, to beds that had been made up with sweet-smelling linens—and to evening papers full of terrible headlines. Sometimes Kitty tried to imagine what the war would be like if women were fighting it. She didn’t believe things would ever have gone so far as this. Vicious as women could be, things never would have gone so far as this. Women would…Well, they’d stop speaking to one another. That would translate into economic sanctions, she guessed. But bombing civilians? Never. Perhaps because women brought new life into the world, they felt more keenly the loss of it. She wondered what Hitler’s mother would think of what he was doing. It didn’t seem possible that he had a mother.

“I know it’s hard to understand, honey,” Kitty said. “But we are imperfect, we humans. We just have to try to fix our messes the best way we can. Sometimes that means we have to pick the lesser of two evils—you’ve heard that phrase, right?”

Tommy nodded.

“So,” Kitty said, “we have to get rid of these guys because they want to do some really bad things to us.”

“Do they all want to do that? Or just the leaders?”

“Hmmm. That’s a very good question, Tommy. I guess sometimes people get brainwashed to believe what their leaders want them to believe.”

“Are we brainwashed, too? By our leaders?”

Kitty rolled onto her side and looked at her brother. “I think there really is a right and a wrong side. And we’re on the right side. But we have to pay a price to make the wrong side stop doing what it’s doing.”

“But what if…Do you worry about Julian and Michael?”

“Yes, I do. I worry about all the guys who are fighting.” She spoke carefully then. “Do you, Tommy?” Had his face changed because he was losing weight? Was he taking all this too much to heart? It would be so like him to worry alone, not wanting to burden others with his fears. “Do you worry a lot about Julian and Michael?”

He shrugged. “I guess so. I sure
think
about stuff a lot.” He smiled. “I got a letter from Julian yesterday.”

“I know,” Kitty said. “I saw it on the telephone table. I got one from him, too.” Three pages! And another “Love.” But nothing in the letter more intimate than a description of the Vienna sausages he’d had for lunch that day, and how the worst hash house in Chicago would taste like heaven to him now. How he’d finally beat the cardsharp he’d met in a game of poker, how exhausting the heat was during the day, how wearing iron (she figured he meant carrying guns) had become as natural as wearing underwear. How he hoped he didn’t get zotzed and come home in a wooden kimono. She’d read this last to her sisters, laughing, but they hadn’t laughed with her, and it had put her in a foul mood.

“Did Julian tell you he thinks his roommate is a nance?” Tommy asked.

Kitty laughed, astonished. “No! Did he tell you that?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “He said he’s really nice, but he’s a nance.”

“Well, Julian may just have been exaggerating a little. You know. Or kidding around a bit. You know Julian.” What was he doing, saying such things to Tommy! She would have to find a way to admonish Julian without demoralizing him. It was tricky business, yelling at a guy who was fighting a war.

“It didn’t seem like he was kidding,” Tommy said. “He said the guy—Philip is his name—was real prissy. But he’s nice, and he can play the banjo, and he gives Julian books to read.”

“Gosh. He told you more than he told me!”

From around the side of the house came Binks, running at full tilt. He wore a colander as a helmet, he had clothespins in his hands that he was using for guns, and he was shooting at the sky. “You’re done for now, you dirty Japs!” he yelled, and his friend Roland made a rat-a-tat sound and then whistled like a falling plane. How did boys do that? Kitty wondered. How did they learn to make those sounds? It was in them from birth, she imagined, like a lust for lace in girls.

Louise had added a lacy slip to her hope chest the other day, a gift from one of the teachers when she heard about Louise’s engagement. Kitty had watched her sister fold it carefully before putting it in the chest. She felt so far away from Louise now. As though she’d been living right next to someone who’d been hiding something dazzling beneath her blouse and now had triumphantly revealed it. In the days that followed Louise getting her ring, Kitty found herself trying to be like her sister. If she were like Louise, maybe she’d get a ring, too. But she wasn’t like Louise. She was Kitty, up and down, front and back, through and through. Louise was going to start accumulating lacy things in her hope chest; Kitty was going to switch jobs and come home every night with dirt under her fingernails. Assuming she had any nails after she started working there.

From the upstairs window, Kitty heard Louise calling her name. She shaded her eyes against the sun and looked up. “What do you
want
?” She didn’t want to be disturbed; she wanted to talk to Tommy some more. Funny to say about someone you saw every day, but she missed him.

“It’s important,” Louise said. “Can you come up here right away?”

Kitty sighed and got up. She brushed off her skirt and hiked the laundry basket onto her hip. One more load to hang, and then she was free. She was going to meet Dot Krug for a Coke at the drugstore, and then they were going to do each other’s hair. Kitty had been planning on going to another servicemen’s center dance with her sisters, but now she said, “Hey, Tommy, do you want to go to the movies with me tonight? Just you and me?”

His eyes widened. “Really?”

“You bet. And afterward, we’ll ride out to Oak Park to Petersen’s and you can have a turtle sundae.”

“Wow!” He leaped up. “Wow!”

“Right after dinner,” Kitty said.

And then, to the impatient Louise, who had continued calling her, “I’m coming! Jeez! Hold your horses!” What could be the problem? She was engaged, wasn’t she?

Kitty raced up the stairs to the bedroom and flopped onto the bed. “Whew!” she said. “It’s hotter out there than you think!”

“Why do you
always
have to race up the stairs?” Louise asked.

Kitty sat up. “What’s eating you? I just
raced
up here because you were acting like it was some emergency or something!”

“You
always
run. You
never
walk. You should
walk.”

Kitty stared at her sister standing before the dresser, her back to her. She walked over and put her hand on Louise’s shoulder. “Hey? What’s wrong, Coots?”

Louise turned and started to speak, but then her eyes filled, and she wiped the tears away.

Kitty gasped. “Louise? Is it Michael? Did something happen to Michael?”

Louise shook her head, and Kitty breathed out, dizzy with relief. “Well, what, then?” Her mouth grew dry. “Julian? Did you hear something about
Julian
?”

“Michael’s mother…” Louise said.

“Michael’s mother told you? Is Julian hurt? Is he dead?”

“No, no!” Louise took her hand. “It’s not Julian, it’s Michael’s mother. She’s really sick, and she won’t tell Michael. But I talked to the doctor, and I think she might be dying! I don’t know what to do!”

“Why won’t she tell Michael?”

“She thinks she’ll improve, and even if she doesn’t, she said it’s better for him to just come back for her funeral than for him to worry about her. She said he has to keep his mind on his job.”

“But what about his father? What does he say?”

“He says he wants to respect his wife’s wishes. But Kitty, I don’t think he knows what do to, either!”

Their mother appeared suddenly in their room; neither girl had heard her coming. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Louise said. And then she told her mother everything.

SUPPER WAS QUIETER THAN USUAL,
with the news of Michael’s mother seeming to hover above the table. Tommy barely ate a thing, and even Billy was affected, eating far less than he usually did. Margaret had said she would go and visit Mrs. O’Conner tomorrow on the pretext of consulting with her about dahlias—Michael’s mother’s gardening skills were legendary.

Kitty wanted to bring up working at a defense job, but now surely wasn’t the time. And why did she have to ask anyway? Suppose the factory didn’t hire her? Then she would have caused a ruckus for nothing. She’d apply after work tomorrow; then, if she was hired, she’d let her parents know. She wasn’t a baby. She could make her own decisions. She stole a look at her father, gamely chewing his mystery meat. What a meal they’d have when the war was over! Kitty had envisioned it million times over: the thick steak, the mile-high apple pie, loaded with ice cream. When the war was over, when the war was over, sometimes it seemed that was all she heard. Everybody dreaming about how wonderful life would be when the boys came home. But when would they come home? How long could this war last? Some people thought only a few months more. Others were not so optimistic. Sally Kirk, a woman with whom Kitty worked, believed herself to have psychic abilities, and she was confident it wouldn’t end for five years. But then, she had predicted she’d meet a tall man in the advertising business and become engaged last summer. So far, her ring finger was as empty as Kitty’s.