Good Hope Road: A Novel (56 page)

Why expend an ounce of energy on an issue that wasn’t theirs, the non-interventionists countered? Why spend American resources, why risk American lives in a conflict that was still largely European in scope?

The argument had drawn a line right through their marriage. Madeleine stared at the full-page advertisement in the papers – ‘STOP HITLER NOW!’ – and reached unconsciously for the flag pin she wore in the lapel of her blouse. If Hitler won in Europe, the advertisement warned, America would find itself alone in a barbaric world. She tried to imagine the prospect and shuddered. She didn’t understand how Jim could stand by and do nothing, especially when the Major, his own father, had been one of the earliest from this country to volunteer for the Great War.

It filled Jim with a bitter anger that she and her friends could be so blind. How quick they were to forget the previous war, an entire generation of men decimated, their lives forever twisted out of shape. Especially Madeleine, after she’d witnessed first-hand the damage it had wrought upon his father, on Connor, on all those at Anacostia, so many soldiers used up in the war and then callously cast aside.

It felt to him like a betrayal, an ultimate forswearing of the Major’s despair over how shabbily those doughboy veterans had been treated, now to endorse this war that wasn’t theirs, to offer up an entire new generation to experience the same hell those doughboys had.

This wanton rabble-rousing, the paranoia that seemed to spread daily . . . Charles Lindbergh was one of the few who made any sense these days, Jim thought disgustedly to himself. The aviator had come out strongly against active intervention by the US.

‘We must stop this hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion,’ he said in a radio broadcast. He scoffed at the danger of an imminent German attack. ‘If we desire peace, we have only to stop asking for war.’

His speech only served to further divide the country. Lindbergh was a Nazi spy, his detractors claimed. Look at all the time he’d spent in Berlin before war broke out. Wasn’t that proof enough of his true intentions?

Back and forth, between co-workers and neighbours and former friends. Everywhere, talk of the war, this rampant, heated argument over America’s involvement in it. Jim and Madeleine went to the movies, where she was nearly reduced to tears by the newsreel and its coverage of the London Blitz. They’d been tuning in to Edward Murrow’s radio broadcasts from London each evening, listening intently as he described the eerie, pitch-black darkness broken by a single searchlight as it swept the sky, the stoic calm of the people while air-raid sirens sounded in the background. His words had been distressing enough to Madeleine, but to see the devastation in London, real, actual images up there on screen – the fires leaping from curtained windows, the billowing smoke, the rescue ladders leaning against blackened buildings, brought it all terribly to life.

The RAF were fighting valiantly, the voice-over said, standing their ground against the ferocity of the German onslaught. Madeleine was overcome by sadness, their dogged bravery and staunch determination to fight this David and Goliath battle. ‘We have to do something,’ she thought helplessly to herself. ‘We’ve got to pitch in.’

Shaken as Jim was by the images, it only strengthened his conviction. It was madness, what was happening in Europe. It would be insanity to invite this wanton destruction upon American heads too.

Madeleine turned to him, shaking her head. Even in the darkened hall, he could make out the distress on her face. His expression softened as he gave her his handkerchief. She leaned against him, resting her head against his shoulder.

She was quiet on the ride home. Jim glanced at her as he drove, but said nothing to break the silence, glad for the absence of an argument and savouring the warmth of her leaning against him.

He was watching her comb out her hair later that night when she turned to him with troubled eyes. ‘Would you ever consider enlisting?’ she asked tentatively, almost afraid of the answer.

And there it was again, the collective differences between them raising a head once more. He looked at her, suddenly tired. ‘To fight someone else’s war? No. And who’d look after the orchard if I left?’

She said nothing, turning back to the mirror as she tried to sort out her conflicting emotions. Part of her deeply thankful for his response, part ashamed, both of his stance and her relief.

He saw only the shame in her face and was stung. ‘It isn’t our war,’ he repeated coldly as he strode from the room. ‘And I’d like to see just how many of your flatlander lot rush to enlist.’

War clouds continued to gather, the looming threat weighing heavier and heavier on the nation’s collective heart. That October, in the heat of election season, and just a month before he would be elected for an unprecedented third term, President Roosevelt announced the first peacetime conscription in the nation’s history. All able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six were called upon to register.

Jim reported at the draft office, doubly irritated by the long lines and the waste of a perfectly good morning right in the middle of hunting season. He easily passed the medical examination, and handed the title deed of the orchard without comment to the registration clerk. He was classified accordingly, in category II-C.

Registrant deferred in support of agriculture. (Agricultural occupation). Fit for unrestricted military service
.

The first number of the draft lottery – 158 – was drawn with great ceremony a few weeks later by the blindfolded Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. The blindfold was the same one that had been used in 1917 by the then Secretary of War Newton Baker, and was a strip of upholstery, the newspapers reported, taken from a chair that had stood in Independence Hall at the signing of the Constitution of the United States in 1789.

There was nobody, Madeleine couldn’t help but notice, not a single person in all her Boston crowd who’d been drafted. Clara Dalloway’s grandson was thrilled to find he was.

‘It’s the first time I’ve ever won a lottery,’ he explained to the reporter of the
Gazette
, beaming with pride.

‘Poor bastard,’ Jim said as he read the interview.

‘I declare this ball a resounding success.’ Douggie Garland sat down beside her, interrupting her reverie. ‘Congratulations, my dear.’

‘It took a village.’

‘I imagine it did. That’s what it takes. A village, many villages, and hopefully soon all of this country will come together in doing what needs to be done.’ He rolled his cigar against an ashtray. ‘Surely you aren’t alone?’

‘No, Freddie’s at the bar.’

‘Stonebridge isn’t a supporter of the movement then, I take it?’

She smiled wanly. ‘The Great Debate has spilled into our home it seems. The husband anti-war, the wife rooting for the Allied cause.’

‘If there were a way to avert the war, we would be for it, of course,’ Garland said. ‘But after the horrors of the London Blitz, and with the dire straits that our allies find themselves in—’ He sucked on his cigar. ‘We can’t be ostriches, sticking our heads in the sand.’

‘Jim’s hardly an ostrich,’ she said at once, rising loyally to his defence. ‘Sometimes, when I think about it – I don’t know, it makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it? Why brook a war that has nothing to do with us?’

‘Because England is our ally. Because we must fight against tyranny.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘Except it isn’t you and I who are going to be doing the actual fighting, are we now?’

She decided to call it an early night.

Freddie escorted her out. They stood in the lobby of the hotel as she fastened her cape.

‘Are you sure you won’t stay longer? Lily Pons is about to go on.’

‘I know . . . it’s just – I’m just tired, I suppose.’

He nodded. ‘Cookie.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Been meaning to tell you all evening – I’m headed over to England.’ He tugged boyishly on his ear. ‘I’ve enlisted, as a pilot.’

Madeleine stared at him in shock. ‘Oh Freddie,’ she said, at a loss for words as she raised her hand to his cheek.

‘I figure there’s only so many times I can ask you to run away with me,’ he said. ‘And since you’re never going to say yes—’

She laughed tremulously. ‘You may as well run away by yourself, to England?’ She hugged him fondly, trying not to cry.

The clock struck midnight. The first strains of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ came over the loudspeakers, Lily Pons’ operatic tenor swelling through the lobby and spilling out into the streets in so beautiful a rendition that even the cabbies paused their honking and momentarily slowed down to listen.

Raydon • August 1941

fter a singularly wet past few weeks that had spoiled the patch of wild strawberries – the fruit rotting on their stems – the thistledown had finally begun to fly in earnest. Ellie stood at a window upstairs, watching the wisps float through the garden, the sun warm on her arms as she sorted the linen. ‘Summer snow,’ she mused wistfully, at once embarrassed by her unaccustomed sentimentality. She sighed. August already. Soon fall would be around the corner, and 1941 would be gone, just like that. What was it about the years that made them go faster and faster the older one got?

All the talk about the war too. It was never-ending. The radio, the newspapers, at the general store and at church suppers – everywhere, the war. Why, even old Asaph and Jeremiah had had a falling-out over it, one calling for action, the other equally dead set against getting involved. At the small memorial service that Carla Dalloway had hosted in the general store after Black Pete passed away, both had nearly come to blows, cursing at one another at the tops of their reedy voices, each trying to whack the other with his cane until folks had intervened.

Another of Madeleine’s magazines had come in with the mail a couple of days ago. The cover story featured the draftees of last October. Carla Dalloway’s grandboy had been sending her letters telling her how sick and tired they all were of boot camp, and the article in the magazine said much the same. Nearly a year on, here they were, these young men who’d so eagerly enlisted, holed up in army camps around the country. Instead of fighting for their country, they’d found themselves digging latrines, endlessly drilling and peeling mountain after mountain of potatoes. All for thirty dollars a month, they complained, when they could have been making six or seven times that amount working in the defence factories.

They were thoroughly disillusioned, the magazine reported, and anxiously waiting for their contracts to be completed come October. They’d even coined a term for it – OHIO – Over The Hill in October, scrawling it in white chalk across walls and over camp beds, a reminder as they counted down the days.

It was this that had caught Jim’s eye, ‘OHIO’, splashed across the cover page. He’d flipped through the article, and of course couldn’t resist rubbing Madeleine’s nose in it.

Ellie sighed again, staring out the window. Things had been fairly good between those two all these past few months. A family Christmas, and Madeleine here for most of the spring. It was just all this talk of the war . . . They had begun to avoid overt discussion of it now, both wearied by their bickering. Their dissent, however, had taken on other, more insidious forms; an iciness between them as each held firm to their ground. The thing about ice, Ellie brooded, was that it had a way of splitting things apart. Working its way into the smallest nooks and crannies so that even after it melted away, like a crack down a rock face, things stood permanently altered. It was almost better, she thought unhappily, when they used to row outright.