Elizabeth M. Norman (31 page)

At last they reached the town of Los Banos and were allowed to disembark. After a day in a cattle car, the hot and humid air felt as refreshing as a cool breeze off Manila Bay. A convoy of trucks arrived and took the internees to their new home, the campus of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture and Forestry, a rural facility at the base of Mount Makiling, about a mile from Los Banos, on a twenty-five-acre
plateau of tropical rain forest, roughly two thousand feet above sea level.
⁷

A double ring of barbed wire surrounded the facility, which consisted of several medium-sized buildings, a gymnasium and scattered bungalows and cottages. The men moved into the various buildings, the women into the infirmary. (Later, when the camp population would swell to more than two thousand, the Japanese brought in Filipino labor gangs to construct long leaky barracks with nipa roofs, woven walls and dirt floors.)

In the weeks that followed the internees set about building their new home, a kind of prison village. They nominated an executive committee, assembled a water and sanitation system, planted a large vegetable garden along the camp perimeter. Soon the fertile soil of Luzon gave them plenty of vegetables to add to their daily allotment of rice. Once again the navy nurses and Dr. Leach set up a hospital, this time turning a foul infirmary—a portable boiler the previous staff had used to sterilize instruments had been left with the remnants of cooked food in it—into a twenty-five-bed facility on the edge of the plateau. When they needed equipment, they turned to the handymen in camp, who fashioned emesis basins and bedpans from corrugated roofing and old tin cans.
⁸

Laura Cobb liked the new camp and was glad she had listened to Red Harrington. She was in charge again, head nurse—head mistress, really, for she saw her job as much more than just supervising nurses. In Manila before the war she often seemed as much house mother as head nurse. Perhaps at forty-five she thought she had to mother her young charges, and she often inserted herself in their lives, attending their cocktail parties, suggesting things for them to ship home, advising them on the latest fashions.
⁹

Cobb, a career officer, had been in charge of the twelve-member nursing staff at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Canacao, at the south end of Manila Bay. She had joined the navy in 1918 after a short stint as a schoolteacher in Atchinson, Kansas. A quiet, slender woman with dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses, she was known for her good manners, her stylish clothes and her supreme self-confidence. She had done two tours in the Philippines and had held enough important posts Stateside, and received enough commendations along the way to establish her authority. She was as firm as Davison, but much more courteous, more engaged. The navy, more than the army, was known for its social rituals—dinners, dances and banquets—and Laura Mae Cobb, with her hazel eyes, tailored clothes and “ladylike ways,” as her nurses described her, negotiated
navy society with style and grace. Even toward the end of the war when malnutrition turned her hair gray and left her five-foot-seven-inch frame looking like a spindle, she still managed to keep her faded-blue denim field uniform neat, still insisted on presenting herself as well as she was able.

In the early days at Los Banos, however, she worried only about doing her job. Almost everything the hospital needed had to be scrounged, built, jerry-rigged or invented. Dr. Leach, for example, had warned that in the steamy environment of Los Banos, tuberculosis would be epidemic, so as a precaution, the nurses developed a cough syrup of onion juice and sugar that managed to check the hacking, expectorating coughs that began to appear in many of the prisoners. Encouraged by their luck, they also tried other “natural treatments” too—a tea from guava leaves for bacillary dysentery and an elixir from mango leaves for high blood pressure and diabetes. (The guavas worked but the mango elixir, recommended by local “healers,” turned out to be so much snake oil.) The adhesive tape supplied by the Japanese was useless—it adhered to nothing—but internees who had been pharmaceutical representatives before the war tapped sap from a rubber tree inside the wire and mixed the sap with oil to form a sticky paste. When a patient needed a dressing, the women simply reached into a large jar of homemade paste with a bamboo spatula, spread a line of the goop on either side of the wound, and placed a piece of gauze or cloth on top. And there was more—drinking glasses fashioned from the beer and Coca-Cola bottles left behind by the students, straws cut from indigenous reeds and mosquito netting woven from a porous material found in banana fiber.

Every evening before curfew, that first group of internees at Los Banos would gather in groups. Some would sit in a coffeehouse shanty for a watery brew of local herbs, others on the playing field to watch the sunset, listen to music, stage skits or hold sing-alongs. One night some lyricist manqué surprised the thirteen nurses in camp with a new version of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”

Let’s give a cheer
For our navy gals
,
Who can’t be beat for style
.
The bumps and jars
of the old box cars
,
They took them with a smile
.
They volunteered for a real tough job
With a cheerful look in their eyes
.
While the road is long
,
Let us tell them in song
,
They’re the pals of us eight hundred guys.
¹⁰

The pals, as it turned out, needed help. Thirteen nurses could not possibly take care of so many patients, so Laura Cobb asked Red Harrington and Dorothy Still to train a few of the men as hospital orderlies. Red started sizing up every man who came in for treatment, looking for anyone who would be willing, and able, to help with bed baths, enemas, examinations and everyday care.

One afternoon she noticed a bright-faced young man sitting in the waiting area. His ankle was wrapped in a cloth and he needed to see a doctor. He had “nice features,” this internee. In fact, the closer she looked, the more she noticed how handsome he was. Who is that good-looking kid in the torn pants? she asked herself.
¹¹

At twenty-eight Mary Rose Harrington had no trouble meeting men. In Manila before the bombs she had been squired to dances and tennis matches by some of the most attractive physicians and officers on base. Now she was staring at the camp garbage collector, one Thomas Page Nelson, before the war an employee of the Department of the Treasury.

While Dr. Leach treated Nelson’s ankle, Red Harrington tried to size him up. His camp job, he said, was an easy one. Not much garbage in a place where everyone was scrounging for food.

In that case, Red replied, “How about coming to the hospital and working with us?”

Page, as he was called, took a long look at the woman in front of him—the gorgeous hair, the dazzling blue eyes, the alabaster skin and Cupid’s-bow lips. Work with her? Sure, he said. When did she want him to start?

That summer Page and three other men took training from the nurses. They learned how to scrub for procedures, handle linen, bathe patients and select the correct instruments for the various examinations and medical procedures performed by Dr. Leach and his nurses. Page seemed to like the work—or the company. Most of the time he teamed with Red and soon they were spending their evenings together as well. They liked to sit at a table in the bamboo coffeehouse, a “very elegant shanty,” as Red described it, talking away from the watchful eyes of the Japanese guards.

One Sunday afternoon, about three months after they had first set
eyes on each other, Page approached his lover, dug deep into a pocket of his pants and pulled out a sapphire ring. He was dirty and he was tired, he told her, but he loved her very much; he very much wanted to marry her.

Red smiled. She kissed him, then whispered yes.

The next day Page Nelson took his bamboo folding chair to a carpenter friend and had it converted into a love seat. In the evenings the couple would carry their little bench to the camp playing field, where they would sit with the others, watching the stars, telling jokes about the guards or listening to records, especially Red’s favorite, “I Got Spurs that Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.” What else would a girl from Elk Point, South Dakota, really like?
¹²

What both wanted most of all was what prisons never provide, privacy. They built a shanty of their own behind the hospital on top of the camp septic tank. And when their friends teased them about its malodorous location, their riposte was to brag that they had the only shanty in camp with a cement floor. They ate their meals together there, and when no one was looking they stole a kiss or an embrace. They never talked of marriage, though, of a full life together with a house in Virginia where Page lived, a home with children and a future. They had no future, they said, only time, uncertain time, and for the moment, at least, each other.

T
HE EXODUS TO
Los Banos created a momentary lull at Santo Tomas, and that moment of stillness seemed to slow passage of time, or at least remind everyone that liberation was far from at hand.

The army nurses had been in camp for more than a year now. Most, in fact, had passed a birthday there.

[ELEANOR GAREN NOTEBOOK, PAGE 6] Yesterday [3-8-43] was my birthday—Twas only a year (sometimes it seems a century and then again only yesterday) that I went on night duty in Bataan.… Yesterday was a far cry from that scene.… We decided to go visiting to the shack [the nurses shanty] or, as we phrase it, “to the country for the day.” So I stood in one line for bread and another for meat. By noon we had gathered up all our parafinalia [
sic
].… It was a nice afternoon with the girls dropping in with presents for me. Charles gave me a pair of pliers. I had to work or rather do duty at 3
P.M
. but didn’t get there until 4
P.M
. then after 9
P.M
. Helen [Cassie] Whit and Adele had a birthday
cake for me. So all in all I had a lovely day. Yet how much happier I was in the jungle working hard than here loafing.
¹³

Eleanor Garen was a contemplative and interior woman, smart and shy, a ravening reader and sometimes writer, with a broad smile and self-effacing laugh that masked an abiding loneliness and an ego hobbled by self-doubt.

She enjoyed the sorority of women and had a small circle of confidants, women who liked to play marathon games of gin rummy, mah-jongg, cribbage and bridge. As they played they smoked thin cigarettes rolled from the crinkled, indigo paper that came wrapped around the cotton bandages used in the hospital, and they would joke that when they got home, they were going to make a fortune selling “blue cigarettes.” To these friends, this clique that went to classes together and played baseball together too, Eleanor seemed so gregarious, so “happy-go-lucky,”
¹⁴
but she was also a private, often solitary woman. Most nights she would sit on her
bejucos
in the Main Building, scribbling her thoughts in a blue-lined composition book.

[GAREN NOTEBOOK, PAGE 1] Preface: Every writing of any length has some sort of an introduction. Being an average individual I of course will follow suit. There comes a time, very frequently under the present status quo, when the necessity of unburdening one’s load becomes essential. Hence, the need for this note book. It will be a patch work book full of scraps of this and that with no unity or even coherent sequence. As long as it relieves the overflow and fills its primary function, it will be a good safety valve. It is not a diary.
¹⁵

Indeed it was not, but it was no psychogram either, no raw log of her dreams and fears, reveries and desperation—at least not in the conventional sense. She did, in fact, “unburden” herself, relieve the “overflow” of worries, but she did this obliquely through some of the most gifted mediums that have ever tried to give voice to the psyche and the soul.

She had apparently acquired an old anthology of poetry and prose, and night after night she would scan the pages for lines of verse or prose that expressed her mood, her state of mind, then copy them in her notebook.

Early in her journal, for example, she turned to Socrates to express the one idea that likely preoccupied most of the sentient internees. “… 
No one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”
¹⁶

Later she called on Blake to help her break down the prison camp walls.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
¹⁷

And in Stephen Crane she likely saw her own sense of isolation.

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe
,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
¹⁸

She loved children and spent a great deal of time with them. The boys could always count on her for a game of catch, and the girls knew she would take part in their imaginary trips and tea parties and push them on the swings. Some afternoons, she would sit for hours and read them fairy tales.