If These Walls Had Ears (11 page)

This was a time when Jessie’s home economics training came in handy. She knew how to stretch a dish. Efficiency and organization
were also at a premium. You had to watch the food stamps and make sure you were using the right stamp from the right ration
book. Every so often, the newspaper would publish a list: “Sugar—last day for No. 12 stamp in Ration Book 1; Coffee—first
day for No. 23 stamp in Ration Book 1.” You wanted to use every stamp you had, and that took planning, organization. To let
a stamp lapse was simply wasteful.

Even though it was wartime, there were light moments. Late one night, Annabelle was sound asleep when her door suddenly swung
open and the overhead light glared in her face. “Get up, Annabelle!” a voice said. “Someone’s murdered Gene Driver and thrown
him in the front door!” Annabelle rubbed her eyes and began to realize that it was Jessie standing there. The Gene Driver
she was talking about was a neighbor. From her little cubbyhole behind the kitchen, Jessie had been startled awake by a thud
at the front of the house. Grabbing her robe and going to the door, she flipped on the porch light and there, in a clump by
the doormat, was Gene Driver. He sure
looked
dead.

Annabelle went and took a peek. While that was happening, Jessie called Miss Alice Ream across the street. Her brother was
staying there, and he soon came over arid inspected the body—which turned out to be an inebriated Gene Driver. Some of his
drinking buddies had dumped him on Jessie’s porch by mistake.

At some point during the war, Jessie decided she could no longer serve meals to the people who stayed there. She told Annabelle
that she was welcome to keep food for herself in the refrigerator. Annabelle appreciated it, but—well, she had something to
talk with Jessie about. Her company, GMAC, had had to close down the Little Rock office because nobody was selling cars. The
company had left one contact man there to keep in touch with the dealers, and Annabelle had stayed to work for the contact
man. But there was nothing to do. Her days were empty, boring, depressing. After eight years at the Armours’, she had come
to the hard conclusion that it was time to go back home to Mississippi.

Jessie hugged her tightly. With Annabelle’s departure, Jessie was losing much more than a boarder.

It was the spring of 1943 when word came from the navy that Charles was a prisoner in the Philippines. About that time, she
also received the first of five cards that she would get from him over the next year. The cards, on a deep manila stock, bore
as heading the imprint of the Imperial Japanese Army. They were form postcards. Using a typewriter with a spotty ribbon, Charles
had been allowed to fill in the blanks or underline certain multiple-choice answers:

1. I am interned at
   Philippine Military Prison Camp No. 2
   
2. My health is—
   excellent;
   good; fair; poor.
   
3. I am injured; sick in hospital; under treatment;
   not under treatment.
   
4. I am—improving; not improving; better;
   well.
   
5. Please see that
   Caroline and Art are notified. Take care of all my things.
   is taken care of.
   
6. {Re: Family}:
   Hope you and Jane well. Please write to me and let me know how you are % Red Cross.
   Love to all. Dont worry.
   
7. Please give my best regards to
   all of my friends.
   

After all this time, even this strained missive seemed like a long, chatty letter. At least Charles was alive! All the neighbors
came to see the card. This little rectangle of paper was a real connection: Charles had actually held it in his hands. Now
Jessie held it. She read and reread it a thousand times, always looking for some previously hidden clue to his condition.
He was worrying, as usual—of
course
she would take care of his things.

She received one other card from him that spring, then two more in the late falls and winter. The final card was slightly
discomforting. In the form sentence reporting on his health, this time he had underlined
fair.
His worrying was also evident: “Wish I could have been with you for Xmas. Am looking forward to receiving a letter from you.
Do not dispose of any of your property. Hope that you, Jane, Caroline are all well and that 1 will be with you again soon.
Love to all.” On the signature line, lie had signed “Charles W. Armour.”

Toward the end of January 1944, the Office of War Information released the shocking story of Japanese brutality during the
Bataan Death March nearly two years before. The country was enraged. A few days after the revelations, Jessie picked up a
new magazine and began to shriek: There was a photograph of the Death March, and she thought she saw Charles in the picture.
Hysterical, she called Jane and Pem, who calmed her down. Later, the family decided it hadn’t been Charles, after all.

Jessie scoured the news stories for names of people she could write to who might know something about Charles. Comdr. M. H.
McCoy, stationed at Fort Blakely, Washington, answered in mid-April 1944. “I knew your son quite well and his health was good
at the time I escaped,” McCoy wrote. They had met in Camp Number 1 and had then gone on to Camp Number 2 together. His recollection
was that Charles had been on the “vegetable-gathering detail.”

That appears to have been her last word about Charles for more than a year.

In February 1945, the Associated Press circulated stories of two different Japanese prison ships that had been torpedoed or
bombed by American planes, with heavy losses among the American POWs. The ships had been en route from the Philippines to
Japan. Obviously, the Japanese were beginning to feel the heat and were attempting to get their prisoners back to Japan. A
few months after those reports, she heard from a man whose name had been mentioned in one of the stories.

22 June 1945

My dear Mrs. Armour:

You probably, this week, received the good news that your son, Charles, is alive and now in Japan. While I did not know him
intimately, I was in prison camps in the Philippines until last December 1944, and the Casualty Section of the Navy Department,
where I am now on temporary duty, has suggested that I write you about your son.

Most of the time Charles was at the prison camp in Davao, Mindanao; he then came to camp # 1, where I had been the previous
2 years, and I met him here for the first time.

We met through a mutual friend, Lt. James Lynch of the Army Engineers.… Charles, Lt. Lynch and I were among the 1600
prisoners who were on the prison ship which sailed from Manila on 13 December 1944. It was sunk on 15 December 1944, at which
time I escaped. Charles and Lt. Lynch were recaptured and later shipped to Japan, as we learned just a few days ago.

We all hope with you that the end of the war is not long distant and that your son will again be with you.

In my mind’s eye, I always see Charles’s homecoming in slow motion, as though it were a movie.

Pem, back from Massachussetts, is mowing the lawn at 501 Holly, struggling with the steep Lee Street hill, when he sees the
taxi coming toward him on Lee. For some reason, he stops his mowing and, instead, watches the cab as it gets closer and closer.
When it reaches Peru, it slowly makes the turn onto Holly, then pulls up at the curb in front of the house. The door opens
and a gaunt man in a naval officer’s uniform slowly unfolds himself from the backseat. By this time, Pem sees that Jane has
already seen Charles arrive and is running out to meet him. Her arms are outstretched, and tears are streaming down her face.

I picture Charles, arm in arm with Jane, walking up that sidewalk toward the red-brick house with the comforting front porch,
the house of his mother and father and sisters and grandmother, the house that had been secured with nails he had carried
fir the workmen so many years before. They had held. No matter what he had seen or done or been through over the past forty-four
months, the house still stood. It was what he had gone to war for.

In real life, even if Charles was thinking such lofty thoughts, they weren’t the only thing on his mind. He was sick and worried,
and there’s evidence that he was also angry: He would tell a friend, “For thirty years I’ve been the fuckee. Now I’m going
to be the fucker.” After the atomic bombs arid the Japanese surrender, Jessie had received word that Charles was coming back
to the States, to Memphis, 127 miles away. Jane and Pem arid their two childrenJanesy and Anne—were back in Little Rock by
then. But the navy made no suggestion that the family visit Charles during the two months he had to spend in the navy hospital.
Charles needed time to recuperate.

Then one day, he showed up in a taxi in front of 501 Holly. On the surface, he was home.

But when Jane ran out to the cab and threw her arms around him, she had the feeling that she seemed like a stranger to him.
“He looked at me so strangely,” she says. Jessie was still at work when Charles got there. While Jane took her brother inside,
Pem ran all over the neighborhood shouting, “Charles is at home! Charles is at home!” Before long, the house was filled with
neighbors. They didn’t speak of the war, at least not in detail. Charles told them he’d been treated for beriberi and scurvy.
They could see, by the scars on his face, that he’d had skin cancers removed. When he first came back to the hospital, he’d
also had hives on his legs and terrible intestinal problems from dysentery. For the time being, he was only going to be home
on weekends; later, he would be mostly in Little Rock and would go back to the hospital for short checkup visits.

When Jessie got home and the family was alone together, Charles told them something else: There was a woman in his life. Her
name was Mildred Ahrens—or Millie, as he called her. She was a navy nurse whom he had met in the hospital. They’d been going
out since shortly after he got there. She was—well, she was a Yankee, from New York. Jessie had been in the South so long—nearly
forty years—that she thought of herself as Southern. It was obvious that Charles was smitten, though, and Jessie told him
he should bring Millie home with him some weekend. He thought that was a splendid idea—one he’d already had himself.

To the family, Charles seemed distant. He would sit in the house by himself, sometimes just staring off into space. Most afternoons,
he would put on his uniform and catch the streetcar to the movie theater. There were lots of movies about the war, and Jane
thought he was trying to find out what he had missed. Sometimes he would sit through the same movie two or three times, coming
home in the early dark of winter to a house warmed by lights.

It wasn’t long before he took Jessie up on her invitation to Millie. They rode over together on the train and were met by
Jessie at the station. Millie still remembers how intimidated she was by Jessie. She seemed so
tall,
so self-assured. She was a handsome woman dressed to the nines, and she talked nonstop. As Jessie drove them to Holly Street,
Millie took in the neighborhood. Kavanaugh was curvy and tree-lined, with old Craftsman houses and stone-fronted apartment
houses. It all looked quaint to a girl from New York.

Millie was embarrassed to talk—she felt awkward about her Yankee accent—but with Jessie around, that was no problem. Jessie
filled the rooms with words. Millie had never encountered anyone who knew so much about the neighbors. Jessie even took out
Charles’s christening dress, telling her about Charles as a baby and holding the dress up for Millie’s inspection.

There were no longer any boarders. Charles slept downstairs in the bedroom he had once shared with Grandma Jackson. Millie
slept upstairs in Annabelle’s old room. Jane and Pem and their babies were across the hall in the room that opened to the
upstairs bath. Millie would share that bath, entering from the hall, and Jessie had given explicit instructions on how to
lock both doors. Still, Millie was uncomfortable knowing those strangers, with unpredictable little children, were just on
the other side of the bathroom door.

In the morning, Millie woke to find Charles in her room, giving her a good-morning kiss.

That June, the summer of 1946, Jessie’s Cape jasmine bush bloomed thick and sweet outside the kitchen door. She cut armloads
of flowers for the wedding, which was held in a Presbyterian chapel in Memphis. Afterward, the new bride and groom, his family,
and five or six of the couple’s friends had an elegant dinner at the Peabody Hotel, where Millie and Charles had done much
of their courting. There was a ballroom on top of the hotel, and a restaurant that Charles especially liked. Even if he and
Millie had been going to a movie, Charles had insisted on dinner first. He couldn’t get enough to eat. In prison camp, he
arid his fellow POWs had passed the time trading recipes, sustaining themselves on the sheer memory of the scents and tastes
of home.

Jessie also decorated the dining table with Cape jasmine. There was an abundance of champagne, and many; many toasts. Jessie
insisted that Charles use some of his considerable back pay to buy Millie a fur coat. Millie, who wasn’t used to alcohol,
drank too much and passed out at the table. The next morning, her husband had breakfast brought in. When she felt better,
they made up for the night before.

After a few days in Memphis, the newlyweds came home to 501 Holly. They moved into the back bedroom downstairs. It was only
temporary, until Charles figured things out. He was trying to get a retirement so that if anything happened to him, Millie
would be taken care of. He would go to Washington for up to two weeks at a time, partly to be treated for his skin cancer
and partly to work on getting the retirement. His worry was palpable. Beriberi caused heart damage, and he seemed to have
an acute sense of his mortality. Many—too many—of his sentences began with “If anything happens to me…”

With Charles in Washington and Jessie and Pem at work, Millie and Jane were thrown together all day long. They would do chores
like washing the clothes and hanging them out to dry in the backyard. Jessie would come home from the state hospital with
jars of food, which she would pour into pans and heat up for supper. One night about a month after the wedding, Millie said,
“I can’t eat; I’m sick.” Jessie took one look at her and said, “You’re pregnant.” Jessie was right. That complicated Charles
and Millie’s plans a little, but they were ecstatic.