The Search for Joyful (30 page)

I felt quite cosmopolitan as I laid out my dimes and placed a call to Alberta. There was no answer from the other end. I was about to hang up when her voice came through the wire. Unmistakably her voice, yet altered. There was no timbre in it, and before knowing why I was asking, “Mama, are you all right?”

I heard her tell me Georges was dead, but it didn't register.

“He was killed two days ago, after the surrender. He was moving from his quarters at Bletchley Park, crossing a field on his way to say goodbye to a friend. And, you know, they're renovating everywhere, trying to clean up the rubble. There was an earth-moving machine working above him. It triggered an unexploded bomb, and the building he was walking by gave way.”

I love you, Mama, I love you. Even that I couldn't say. My dimes were used up. I continued to sit in the phone booth.

I sat in the public phone booth and tried to make sense of things, collapsing buildings, dying two days after the war ended, never coming home. Thank God Connie was married and had her own life. Still, I know she thought of herself as half a person. I remembered Georges from the time I was very little. I remembered he made shadow pictures for me on the wall, a rabbit whose nose twitched, a long-necked dinosaur that changed into a giraffe when I got scared. I remembered his magician's hat, and that he had made reality disappear and replaced it with his own. Please, please. Make this reality go away, make it disappear.

I walked back to where Erich waited.

“Well,” he asked, “can they come?”

“No.” I didn't tell him. I was afraid he would try to comfort me. For things that make no sense there is no comfort.

 
I DIDN'T WANT to be married in a church. That belonged to another young man, and young woman.

I put on my best dress, and Erich bought a beautiful spring bouquet of jonquils and sweet alyssum, which I carried, trying not to remember the flowers I once found in my shoes.

For the occasion he borrowed the onyx ring. “On our first anniversary you'll have a gold band,” he promised.

We were married before a justice of the peace in a civil ceremony, one the dominion of Canada recognized. Since we were in Canadian jurisdiction, the ring went on the fourth finger of my left hand.

There was no one to stand up for either of us. I hadn't called Mama back. I hadn't the heart. Erich had been part of the German war machine responsible for the fact that Georges would not be coming back. I wasn't sure she would feel that way, but she might. And I didn't want any cloud on this special day.

I didn't know Erich had rented a motel room. It was the first of the surprises he'd arranged. “I'm going to dress you like an Austrian bride. Look,” and he produced a pair of lace curtains from Mother Superior's room, that were supposedly in the wash. He draped one around me in a sort of flounce. The other, a bridal veil, he fastened to my hair with bobby pins I produced from my purse.

He stood back and surveyed his efforts. “The hair is not right,” he said critically. “It needs to be up. And, you know, poofy in front.”

“I know how to do that,” and I imitated one of Mandy's coiffeurs.

He was delighted. “You look like a grand duchess,” he said, and wound flowers in my pompadour. I broke one off to put behind his ear. Then we bowed to each other, linked arms, and waltzed around the room. Every time he made a turn he fell down, me on top of him. This occasioned a glass of claret, which was part of his surprise, and a song.

He started with “The Blue Danube.” I contributed the latest Bing Crosby hit, “Don't Fence Me In.” He took over with “
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.
”

He was shy about making love because of his leg, but a sheet tossed lightly over us, and who knew. Who knew, who cared? When he called me
Liebchen
the great Nordic god Thor strode the moment, sweeping us to a Valhalla of storm and ecstasy. We clung to each other. The onyx ring, on my left hand now, said, You are one.

 
THE SURPRISES CONTINUED. Next, our wedding breakfast. He had paid the manager's wife to shop for and cook the meal, which he assured me was in the finest Austrian tradition.

“There,” he said, sitting across from me, while between us was spread bacon and eggs, pancakes, potatoes, and a lavish frosted roll. “Now I feel married.” The coffee was steaming hot, and ladled into it, a mountain of whipped cream.

Erich's final surprise was to produce Mandy. She gave me a big hug and kiss. “Getting married agrees with you,” she said, “you should do it more often.”

Out of her nurse's uniform she looked like a pinup girl fresh off a Petty calendar. Erich, it turned out, had phoned and persuaded her to come after swearing her to secrecy.

“I'm not in touch with anyone from the hospital,” she told us. “But Robert made it back. We're engaged,” she said, answering my unasked question. Then came a defense and justification of him, which, while it failed to change my opinion of Robert, made me like her even more.

“You can't believe what that boy went through. He was posted to North Africa with the 8th, just west of Tobruk, the Gazala-Bir line. And it sobered him down, but good. Do you know it's absolutely true that the enemy—” She stopped self-consciously. “Excuse me, Erich. But it's got to be said. They didn't pay the slightest attention to the red cross clearly painted on top of the hospital roof. They strafed everything. Patients were killed and one of the doctors.”

“He was with the 8th Army?” Eric asked. “That means they were up against Rommel.”

“That's right. The Boche—the Germans,” she corrected herself, “held everything from Alamein to Tripoli. The conditions were impossible, a dead horse right outside the building swelled up and gave off an awful odor. The hospital ran short of supplies. Especially water. The patients weren't bathed. Can you imagine, Kathy? Everyone stank, and everyone had heat rash. I mean, they sweated all day and slept in their clothes at night.

“And the birds! That was the other thing, birds flew up and down the corridors, and dogs prowled between the beds licking up anything on the floor. Can you imagine working under those conditions?”

She apparently had put out of her mind that volunteering for these conditions saved his skin. However, I said temperately, “As long as he came out of it okay. So you're engaged?”

“Oh yes. He even got a commendation. And that went a long way toward smoothing things over with my dad.” She went on to expound a bit of Mandy philosophy. “Have you ever noticed that when things are meant to be, everything falls into place?”

Not for everybody, I reflected, pushing back thoughts of Crazy Dancer and Georges, and the Gurkhas, trying not to remember British, New Zealand, and Maori boys left on the mountain. Mandy went on. “A surgeon friend of Dad's is retiring and he bought the practice for Robert.”

I saw what she meant about things falling into place.

“I don't intend to stay in the nursing profession,” Mandy was saying. “You have to be crazy to work that hard. Besides, we're planning a family. We want three children, a boy, a girl, and—whatever. What do you two want?”

We looked shyly at each other. Oddly enough we had never discussed children.

“A whatever,” Erich told her.

Mandy treated us to a dinner at the Hotel Windsor, and pulled me into the ladies' room to say, “Remember our first quarrel?—well, almost a quarrel. I told you people were talking about the time you were spending with Erich, and I advised you to cool it. I'm so glad you didn't pay any attention to me.”

I hugged her, thinking this was the reason I loved this flighty, irrepressible girl. She was genuinely glad to see me happy. She was a friend.

Back at the table she explained for the second time that Robert couldn't be here. She filled in the picture by adding that he was assisting at a rhinoplasty.

“That's a nose job, isn't it?” Erich asked.

It turned out the practice was in plastic surgery.

“But Mandy,” I couldn't help exclaiming, “he's such a talented surgeon. You mustn't let him waste his gift.”

Mandy set down her fork and stared at me in her nearsighted way. “I knew you'd say that, Kathy. Every time I'm with you, you change my entire life. That's exactly what I said to Robert, feeling just like you when I said it. But he's not only doing the rich and infamous. Three days a week it's reconstructive work on vets. You remember those ‘serviceable' faces we gave them on ward A?”

It was hard to apart from Mandy. I didn't know when I'd see her again.

Later that night I sneaked Erich into my room, and under the covers. Money for another motel evening had run out, so in whispers we planned our life. One of the first things Erich did was to apply for Canadian residency. That made it all seem real. The little blond boy in the sailor suit pitching stones at the edge of the Bodensee, a future Canadian citizen.

We worked on a vita for him to mail to various architectural firms here in Montreal and Quebec, listing his schooling and credentials. With his degree in engineering this seemed a good route to try. We worried about the backlash he was almost certain to encounter. But when we thought about it soberly, it didn't seem that a one-legged Austrian naval lieutenant and an Indian woman who didn't know much about being Indian would do too well trapping and living off the land.

He would, he decided, start as a draftsman. “First I'll draw the blueprints, then I'll design them, and then . . .”

“And by then you'll be a world-famous architect and own the company.”

“And go into politics,” he concluded.

“Politics?” I was impressed.

He seemed a bit embarrassed. “That's the way I would have wound up if I'd gone back to Austria. In my family it's expected.”

“Well, here nothing's expected. You do what you want.”

After Erich was almost discovered in the hall making his nightly excursion to my room, we rethought our secret marriage and came to the conclusion that we should tell Sister Egg.

 
HAND IN HAND, we stood in front of her desk. She looked up with candid, round, nearsighted eyes, framed in glasses that mildly distorted them.

Before she could verbalize her question, Erich took my hand and stretched it toward her. Since our marriage I wore the ring on my right hand, on the vena amoris, which pleased Erich—and no one else suspected.

“What's this?” Sister asked.

“We're married,” I said, wiggling my fingers so the small diamond flashed.

Egg rose from the chair to make the sign of the cross over us. Her round child's face was flooded with joy. “Bless you. Bless you both.” Then, sinking back in her chair, “Imagine, a romance here, within the walls of this old building. It is absolutely delicious to think about. And you love each other very much?” She looked from me to Erich and back again.

“Very much,” he assured her. “We love each other very much.”

“Good. Good. That is very good. It is also good not to broadcast it. There is very little forgiveness yet for the war. I myself don't want to know anything officially.” And she recited one of the little aphorisms for which she was famous. “Never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you. Now,” she said expeditiously, “I will take soundings, ferret out the lay of the land, and let you know when it's advisable for you to make your announcement.”

“Isn't she something?” I said to Erich that night under the covers. Sister Egg, heaven knows under what pretext, protected us by changing floors with Sister Magdalena. Even with this added security, we still laughed with our heads under the covers, and when he hummed Austrian folks songs, it was with his lips against my ear.

We found out all sorts of things about each other. He had mixed up the names of colors when he was little. He thought blood was green. And I told him the story Mama Kathy used to tell me, that when I was little I insisted on dressing myself, and the year I started school wore my dresses backward so I could button them.

“Kathy, Kathy,” he said. “You were always Kathy.”

I told him about my blue-eyed papa. “Mama used to say his eyes were so blue you could swim in them.”

Finally I was able to tell him. I hadn't planned it, it just spilled out, the pent-up agony over Georges. “The reason no one came to our wedding is that I never asked them.”

“You didn't? But I thought—”

“I know, the phone call. Erich, Mama Kathy just had word. Georges is dead. Two days after the war ended.” I was able to cry now, so harshly that my body shook. Now I wanted his comfort, now I could accept it. We had grown close.

What to do about Mama Kathy had been troubling me. I'd been married for six weeks, and she didn't know about it.

Erich resolved the dilemma by saying, “The best thing to do now is just show up.”

“You mean, go back to Alberta? That's where she is now.”

“Yes. We'll save for it.”

I hugged him for having such wonderful ideas.

WE SENT OFF the first job inquiries. Acceptance would bring independence. We could find an apartment, set up housekeeping, and openly acknowledge our marriage. But we worried.

Since Egg had not reported back to us, I could only assume that she still felt a tide of opposition, and did not judge even my job secure. Especially now, with prisoners repatriated, half the cots were empty in many wards. The pressing need for nurses was past. We were treating mainly chronic conditions. Aside from service-related cases of malaria contracted in the South Pacific, hookworm picked up in the Philippines, and an eye condition brought back from the Libyan desert, there were largely civilian disorders, the usual appendectomies, fractures, and infections, and Dr. Bennett had a cholecystectomy scheduled. The hospital was no longer on a wartime footing. I could easily be replaced. So for the moment we left things as they were.