To Sail Beyond the Sunset (35 page)

Then one day they took us with them and I found myself the surprised owner of a numbered bank account, for 155,515 grams of fine gold (which I had no trouble interpreting as one hundred thousand dollars, but it was not called such). Then I found myself signing powers of attorney over “my” bank account to Brian and to Justin, while Eleanor did the same with a similar account. And a limited power of attorney to someone I had never heard of in Winnipeg, Canada.

We were not placed in that fancy suite because we were high society; we were not. But the purser was carrying in his safe I do not know how many ounces of gold, most of which belonged to the Ira Howard Foundation, and some of which belonged personally to Brian, and to Justin, and to my father. That gold was moved by the Bank of France from Cherbourg to Zurich, and we rode with it.

In Zurich Brian and Justin, as witnesses and trustees for the Foundation, saw the shipment opened, saw it counted and weighed, and then deposited with a consortium of three banks. For the Foundation had taken very seriously Theodore’s warning that Mr. Roosevelt would devalue the dollar, then make it illegal for American citizens to own or possess gold.

“Justin,” I asked, “what happens if Governor Roosevelt does not run for the presidency? Or does but is not elected?”

“Nothing. The Foundation would be no worse off. But have you lost confidence in Ted? On his advice we rode the market up, and then cashed out before it crashed, and now the Foundation is about six times as wealthy as it was a year ago, all through depending on Ted’s predictions.”

“Oh, I believe in Theodore! I was just wondering.”

Mr. Roosevelt was elected and he did indeed devalue the dollar and made it illegal for Americans to possess gold. But the assets of the Foundation had been placed out of reach of this confiscation. As was my own numbered bank account. I never touched it but Briney told me that it was not simply lying idle; he was using “my” money to make more money.

Brian was now a trustee of the Foundation, vice Mr. Chapman, who had been removed from the board for having lost his own money in the stock market. A trustee of the Foundation had to be himself qualified for Howard benefits (four living grandparents at time of marriage) and had to be himself a money-maker. If there were other requirements, I do not know what they were.

Justin was now chairman of the board and chief executive, vice Judge Sperling, who was still a trustee but was past ninety and had elected not to work quite so hard. When we got back to Kansas City, Justin and Brian set up offices in the Scarritt Building as “Weatheral and Smith, Investments” while “Brian Smith Associates” took an office on the same floor.

We never again had money worries but the decade of the Depression was not a time when it was fun to be rich. We strove to avoid the appearance of being rich. Instead of buying a fancy house in the Country Club district we bought that farmhouse at a bargain price, then rebuilt it into a more satisfactory structure. It was a period when skilled craftsmen were eager to get work at wages they would have sneered at in 1929.

The nation’s economy was stuck on dead center and no one seemed to know why and everyone from bootblack to banker had a solution he wanted to see tried. Mr. Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 and, yes, the banks did close but the Smiths and the Weatherals had cash under the mattress and groceries squirreled away; the bank holiday did us no harm. The country seemed invigorated by the energetic actions of “The New Deal,” the new president’s name for a series of nostrums that came pouring out of Washington.

In retrospect it seemed that the “reforms” that constituted the New Deal did nothing to correct the economy—yet it is hard to fault emergency measures that put food into the mouths of the destitute. The WPA and the PWA and the CCC and the NRA and the endless make-work programs did not cure the economy and may well have done damage…but in Kansas City in the 1930s they almost certainly served to avoid food riots by desperate people.

On September first, 1939, ten years after Black Tuesday, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war against Germany. World War II had started.

The Frantic Forties

In the summer of 1940 Brian and I were living in Chicago at 6105 Woodlawn, an address just south of the Midway. It was a large apartment building, eighty units, owned by the Howard Foundation through a dummy. We occupied what was called “the Penthouse”—the west end of the top floor, a living room and balcony, a kitchen, four bedrooms, two baths.

We needed the extra bedrooms, especially in July during the Democratic National Convention. For two weeks we had from twelve to fifteen people sleeping in an apartment intended for a maximum of eight. I do not recommend this. The apartment did not have airconditioning, it was an exceptionally hot summer, and Lake Michigan a few hundred yards away turned our flat into a Turkish bath. At home I would have coped with it by walking around in my skin. But I could not do so in the presence of strangers. One of the real benefits of Boondock is that skin is just skin—means nothing.

I had not been in Chicago other than to change trains since 1893. Brian had frequently visited Chicago without me, as this flat was often used for Howard Foundation board meetings, the Foundation having moved its registered address from Toledo to Winnipeg in 1929. As Justin explained it to me, “Maureen, while we don’t advertise what we’re doing, we won’t be breaking any laws about private ownership of gold; we are simply planning for whatever develops. The Foundation is now restructured under Canadian law, and its registered secretary is a Canadian lawyer, who is in fact a Howard client himself and a Foundation trustee. I never touch gold, even with gloves on.”

(Brian expressed it otherwise. “No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law. Nor does he feel guilt over breaking it. He simply follows the Eleventh Commandment.”)

This time Brian was not in Chicago for a board meeting; he was there to watch the Chicago commodities market and to deal in it, because of the war in Europe—while I was in Chicago because I wanted to be. Much as I enjoyed being a brood mare, after forty years of it and seventeen babies, I relished seeing something other than wet diapers.

There was indeed much to see. The parkway a hundred yards north of us, stretching from Washington Park to Jackson Park and called the Midway Plaisance, was in fact a midway the last time I had seen it, with everything from Little Egypt’s belly dance to pink cotton candy. Now it was a beautiful grassy park, with the matchless Fountain of Time by Lorado Taft at the west end and the lovely Fifty-seventh Street beach at the east end. The main campus of the University of Chicago, great gray Gothic buildings, dominated its north side. The university had been founded the year before I had come here as a girl, but none of these buildings had been built by then—as near as I could recall several major exhibit halls had occupied the ground now constituting the campus. I could not be certain, as nothing looked the same.

The elevated trains were much more widespread and now they were powered by electricity instead of steam. On the surface there were no longer horse cars or even cable cars; electric trolley cars had replaced them. No more horses anywhere—autos bumper to bumper, a dubious improvement.

The Field Museum, three miles to the north and on the lake, had been founded after my long visit in ’93; its Malvina Hoffman exhibit, The Races of Man, was in itself worth a trip to the Windy City. Near it was the Adler Planetarium, the first one I ever visited. I loved the shows at the planetarium; they let me daydream of traveling among the stars like Theodore—but I did not dream that I would ever really do so. That hope was buried, along with my heart, somewhere in France.

Chicago in ’93 had kept eleven-year-old Maureen Johnson round-eyed; Chicago in 1940 kept Maureen Smith, now officially forty-one years old, still more round-eyed, there were so many new wonders to see.

One change I did not like: in 1893 if I happened to be out after dark, Father did not worry and neither did I. In 1940 I was careful never to be caught out after dark, other than on Brian’s arm.

Just before the 1940 Democratic convention the “Phony War” ended and France fell. On June sixth at Dunkirk, France, the British evacuated what was left of their army and that was followed by one of the greatest speeches in all histories: “—we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the streets, we shall never surrender—”

Father telephoned Brian, told him that he was signing up with the AFS. “Brian, this time even the Home Guard says I’m too old. But these folks are signing up medics the Army won’t accept. They want them for support service in war zones and they’ll take anybody who can saw off a leg—meaning me. If this is the only way I can fight the Huns, then this is what I’ll do—I owe that to Ted Bronson. Understand me, sir?”

“I quite understand.”

“How soon can you put somebody else here to watch the youngsters?”

I could hear both sides, so I took the phone. “Father, Brian can’t come home now but I can. Although I may be able to put Betty Lou there in my place even quicker. Either way, you can go ahead with your plans. But, Father, listen to me. You take care of yourself! Do you hear me?”

“I’ll be careful, Daughter.”

“Please do so, please! I’m proud of you, sir. And Theodore is proud of you, too. I know.”

“I shall try to make both you and Ted proud of me, Maureen.”

I said good-bye quickly and hung up before my voice broke. Briney was looking thoughtful. “I’ll have to get busy right away and correct my age with the Army. Or they might start saying that I am too old.”

“Briney! Surely you don’t expect to convince the Army that you are your Howard age? They have years and years of records on you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t try to tell the adjutant general my Howard age. Although I don’t think I look any older than the forty-six it says on my driver’s license. I mean that I want to correct the little white lie I told in 1898. When I was actually fourteen but swore that I was twenty-one so that they would let me enlist.”

“Fourteen indeed! You were a senior at Rolla.”

“I was precocious, just like our children. Yes, dearest, I was a senior at Rolla in ’98. But there is nobody left in the War Department who knows that. And nobody is likely to tell them. Maureen, a reserve colonel fifty-six years old is a lot more likely to be ordered to duty than one who is sixty-three. About one hundred percent more likely.”

▣

I’m using a Time-agent’s field recorder keyed to my voice and concealed in a body cavity. No, no, not concealed in the tunnel of love; that would not do, as Time agents aren’t nuns and are not expected to be. I mean an artificial cavity about where my gall bladder used to be. This gadget is supposed to be good for a thousand hours and I hope it is working properly because, if these spooks scrag me—better make that “when they scrag me”—I hope that Pixel can lead somebody to my corpse and thereby let the Time Corps retrieve the record. I want the Circle to understand what I was trying to do. I should have done it openly, I suppose, but Lazarus would have grabbed it away from me. I have perfect hindsight—not so good in the other direction.

▣

Brian did manage to “correct” his War Department age, simply because his general wanted him. But he did not manage to get himself ordered to a combat command. Instead combat came to him—he was holding down a desk at the Presidio and we were living in an old mansion on Knob Hill when the Japanese pulled their sneak attack on San Francisco, December 7, 1941.

It is an odd feeling to look up into the sky, see planes overhead, feel their engines deep in your bones, see their bellies give birth to bombs, and know that it is too late to run, too late to hide, and that you have no control whatever over where those bombs will hit—on you or on houses a block away. The feeling was not terror; it was more a sense of déjà vu, as if I had been there a thousand times before. I don’t care to feel it again but I know why warriors (real ones, not wimps in uniform) always seek combat assignments, not desk jobs. It is in the presence of death that one lives most intensely. “Better one crowded hour of life—”

I have read that in time line three this sneak attack was made on Hawaii, not San Francisco, and that California Japanese were thereafter moved back from the coast. If so, they were extremely lucky, for that spared them the blood bath that took place in time line two, where more than sixty thousand Japanese-Americans were lynched or shot or (in some cases) burned alive on Sunday through Tuesday, December 7-9, 1941. Did this affect what we did to Tokyo and Kobe later? I wonder.

Wars that start with sneak attacks are certain to be merciless; all the histories prove it.

As one result of those lynch mobs President Barkley placed California under martial law. In April 1942 this was eased off and only the twenty-mile strip inland from the mean high-tide line was militarized, but the zone was extended up the coast to Canada. In San Francisco this caused no special inconvenience—it was much like living on a military reservation and a marked improvement over San Francisco’s usual civic corruption—but after dark on the coast itself there was always a danger that some sixteen-year-old boy in a National Guard uniform, armed with a World War I Springfield, might get nervous and trigger happy.

Or so I heard; I never risked it. The beach from Canada to Mexico was a combat zone; anyone on it after dark was risking sudden death and many found it.

I had my youngest with me, Donald, four, and Priscilla, two. My school-age children—Alice, Doris, Patrick, and Susan—were in Kansas City with Betty Lou. I had thought of Arthur Roy as being school age (born 1924), but his cousin Nelson swore him into the Marine Corps the day after the bombing of San Francisco, along with his older brother Richard (born 1914); they went to Pendleton together. Nelson was on limited duty, having left a foot in Belleau Wood in 1918. Justin was on the War Production Board, based in Washington but traveling rather steadily; he stayed with us on Knob Hill several times.