Orphan Train (29 page)

But Dutchy doesn’t join the bandwagon. “Let them come for me,” he says. I don’t want to believe he’ll get called up—after all, Dutchy is a teacher; he’s needed in the classroom. But soon enough it becomes clear that it’s only a matter of time.

T
HE DAY
D
UTCHY LEAVES FOR
F
ORT
S
NELLING IN
H
ENNEPIN
County for basic training, I take the claddagh off the chain around my neck and wrap it in a piece of felt. Tucking it in his breast pocket, I tell him, “Now a part of me will be with you.”

“I’ll guard it with my life,” he says.

The letters we exchange are filled with hope and longing and a vague sense of the importance of the mission of the American troops. And the milestones of his training: Dutchy passes his physical and scores high on the mechanical aptitude test. Based on these results he’s inducted into the navy to help replace those lost at Pearl Harbor. Soon enough, he’s on a train to San Diego for technical training.

And when, six weeks after he leaves, I write to tell him that I’m pregnant, Dutchy says that he is over the moon. “The thought of my child growing inside you will keep me going through the roughest days,” he writes. “Just knowing that finally I have a family waiting for me makes me more determined than ever to do my duty and find my way home.”

I am tired all the time and sick to my stomach. I’d like to stay in bed, but I know it’s better to stay busy. Mrs. Nielsen suggests that I move back in with them. She says they’ll take care of me and feed me; they’re worried that I’m getting too thin. But I prefer to be on my own. I’m twenty-two years old now, and I’ve gotten used to living like an adult.

As the weeks pass I am busier than ever, working long days in the store and volunteering in the evenings, running the metal drives and organizing shipments for the Red Cross. But behind everything I do is a low hum of fear.
Where is he now, what is he doing?

In the letters I write to Dutchy I try not to dwell on my sickness, the constant queasy feeling that the doctor tells me means the baby is thriving inside me. I tell him instead about the quilt I’m making for the baby, how I cut the pattern out of newspaper and then fine sandpaper, which sticks to the material. I chose a pattern with a woven look at the corners that resembles the weaving of a basket, five strips of fabric around the border. It’s cheerful—yellow and blue and peach and pink calico, with off-white triangles in the middle of each square. The women in Mrs. Murphy’s quilting group—of which I am the youngest member and honorary daughter; they’ve cheered my every milestone—are taking extra care with it, hand sewing in precise small stitches a pattern on top of the design.

Dutchy completes his technical training and aircraft carrier flight deck training, and after he’s been in San Diego for a month, he learns that soon he’ll be shipping out. Given his training and the desperate situation with the Japanese, he figures he’ll be heading to the Central Pacific to assist Allied forces in that region, but nobody knows for sure.

Surprise, skill, and power—this, the navy tells its sailors, is what it will take to win the war.

The Central Pacific. Burma. China.
These are only names on a globe. I take one of the world maps we sell in the store, rolled tightly and stored in a vertical container, and spread it on the counter. My finger skims the cities of Yangon, near the coast, and Mandalay, the darker mountainous region farther north. I was prepared for Europe, even its far reaches, Russia or Siberia—but the Central Pacific? It’s so far away—on the other side of the world—that I have a hard time imagining it. I go to the library and stack books on a table: geographical studies, histories of the Far East, travelers’ journals. I learn that Burma is the largest country in Southeast Asia, that it borders India and China and Siam. It’s in the monsoon region; annual rainfall in the coastal areas is about two hundred inches, and the average temperature of those areas is close to ninety degrees. A third of its perimeter is coastline. The writer George Orwell published a novel,
Burmese Days,
and several essays about life there. What I get from reading them is that Burma is about as far from Minnesota as it’s possible to be.

Over the next few weeks, as one day grinds into the next, life is quiet and tense. I listen to the radio, scour the
Tribune,
wait anxiously for the mail drop, and devour Dutchy’s letters when they come, scanning quickly for news—is he okay? Eating well, healthy?—and parsing every word for tone and nuance, as if his sentences are a code I can crack. I hold each blue-tinted, tissue-thin letter to my nose and inhale. He, too, held this paper. I run my finger over the words. He formed each one.

Dutchy and his shipmates are waiting for orders. Last-minute flight-deck drills in the dark, the preparations of sea bags, every corner filled and every piece in place, from rations to ammunition. It’s hot in San Diego, but they’re warned that where they’re going will be worse, almost unbearable. “I’ll never get used to the heat,” he writes. “I miss the cool evenings, walking along the street holding your hand. I even miss the damn snow. Never thought I’d say that.” But most of all, he says, he misses me. My red hair in the sun. The freckles on my nose. My hazel eyes. The child growing in my stomach. “You must be getting big,” he says. “I can only imagine the sight.”

Now they’re on the aircraft carrier in Virginia. This is the last note he’ll send before they embark; he’s giving it to a chaplain who came on board to see them off. “The flight deck is 862 feet long,” he writes. “We wear seven different colors, to designate our jobs. As a maintenance technician, my deck jersey, float coat, and helmet are an ugly green, the color of overcooked peas.” I picture him standing on that floating runway, his lovely blond hair hidden under a drab helmet.

Over the next three months I receive several dozen letters, weeks after he writes them, sometimes two in the same day, depending on where they were mailed from. Dutchy tells me about the tedium of life on board—how his best friend from their basic training days, another Minnesotan named Jim Daly, has taught him to play poker, and they spend long hours belowdecks with a revolving cast of servicemen in an endless ongoing game. He talks about his work, how important it is to follow protocol and how heavy and uncomfortable his helmet is, how he’s beginning to get used to the roar of the plane engines as they take off and land. He talks about being seasick, and the heat. He doesn’t mention combat or planes being shot down. I don’t know if he isn’t allowed to or if he doesn’t want to frighten me.

“I love you,” he writes again and again. “I can’t bear to live without you. I’m counting the minutes until I see you.”

The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less clichéd. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance.
I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe.

Hemingford, Minnesota, 1943

It is ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning and I’ve been in the store for an
hour, first going over accounts in the back room and now walking down each aisle, as I do every day, to make sure that the shelves are tidy and the sale displays are set up correctly. I’m in the back aisle, rebuilding a small pyramid of Jergens face cream that has toppled into a stack of Ivory soap, when I hear Mr. Nielsen say, “Can I help you?” in a strange stiff voice.

Then he says, sharply, “Viola.”

I don’t stop what I’m doing, though my heart races in my chest. Mr. Nielsen rarely calls his wife by her name. I continue building the pyramid of Jergens jars, five on the bottom, then four, three, two, one on top. I stack the leftover jars on the shelf behind the display. I replace the Ivory soap that was knocked off the pile. When I’m done, I stand in the aisle, waiting. I hear whispering. After a moment, Mrs. Nielsen calls, “Vivian? Are you here?”

A Western Union man is standing at the cash register in his blue uniform and black-brimmed cap. The telegram is short. “The Secretary of War regrets to inform you that Luke Maynard was killed in action on February 16, 1943. Further details will be forwarded to you as they become available.”

I don’t hear what the Western Union man says. Mrs. Nielsen has started to cry. I touch my stomach—the baby. Our baby.

In the coming months, I will get more information. Dutchy and three others were killed when a plane crashed onto the fleet carrier. There was nothing anyone could do; the plane came apart on top of him. “I hope you will find comfort in the fact that Luke died instantly. He never felt a thing,” his shipmate Jim Daly writes. Later I receive a box of his personal effects—his wristwatch, letters I wrote to him, some clothes. The claddagh cross. I open the box and touch each item, then close it and put it away. It will be years before I wear the necklace again.

Dutchy hadn’t wanted to tell anyone on base that his wife was pregnant. He was superstitious, he said; he didn’t want to jinx it. I’m glad of that, glad that Jim Daly’s letter of condolence is one to a wife, not a mother.

The next few weeks I get up early in the morning, before it’s light, and go to work. I reorganize entire sections of merchandise. I have a big new sign made for the entrance and hire a design student to work on our windows. Despite my size, I drive to Minneapolis and walk around the large department stores, taking notes about how they create their window displays, trends in colors and styles that haven’t filtered up to us yet. I order inner tubes, sunglasses, and beach towels for summer.

Lil and Em take me to the cinema, to a play, out to dinner. Mrs. Murphy invites me regularly for tea. And one night I am woken by a searing pain and know it’s time to go to the hospital. I call Mrs. Nielsen, as we’ve planned, and pack my small bag, and she picks me up and drives me there. I am in labor for seven hours, the agony so great in the last stretch that I wonder if it’s possible to split in half. I start to cry from the pain, and all the tears I haven’t shed for Dutchy come flooding out. I am overcome with grief, with loss, with the stark misery of being alone.

I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.

Lying in that hospital bed I feel all of it: the terrible weight of sorrow, the crumbling of my dreams. I sob uncontrollably for all that I’ve lost—the love of my life, my family, a future I’d dared to envision. And in that moment I make a decision. I can’t go through this again. I can’t give myself to someone so completely only to lose them. I don’t want, ever again, to experience the loss of someone I love beyond reason.

“There, there,” Mrs. Nielsen says, her voice rising in alarm. “If you keep on like this you’ll”—she says “go dry,” but what I hear is “die.”

“I want to die,” I tell her. “I have nothing left.”

“You have this baby,” she says. “You’ll go on for this baby.”

I turn away. I push, and after a time the baby comes.

The little girl is as light as a hen in my arms. Her hair is wispy and blond. Her eyes are as bright as underwater stones. Dizzy with fatigue, I hold her close and shut my eyes.

I have told no one, not even Mrs. Nielsen, what I am about to do. I whisper a name in my baby’s ear: May. Maisie. Like me, she is the reincarnation of a dead girl.

And then I do it. I give her away.

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011

“Oh, Vivian. You gave her away,” Molly says, leaning forward in her chair.

The two of them have been sitting for hours in the wingbacks in the living room. The antique lamp between them casts a planetary glow. On the floor, a stack of blue onionskin airmail letters bound with string, a man’s gold watch, a steel helmet, and a pair of military-issue socks spill out of a black steamer trunk stamped with the words
U.S. NAVY.

Vivian smooths the blanket on her lap and shakes her head as if deep in thought.

“I’m so sorry.” Molly fingers the never-used baby blanket, its basket-weave design still vivid, the stitches intricately pristine. So Vivian had a baby and gave her away . . . and then married Jim Daly, Dutchy’s best friend. Was she in love with him, or was he merely consolation? Did she tell him about the baby?

Vivian leans over and shuts off the tape recorder. “That’s really the end of my story.”

Molly looks at her, puzzled. “But that’s only the first twenty years.”

Vivian shrugs lightly. “The rest has been relatively uneventful. I married Jim, and ended up here.”

“But all those years . . .”

“Good years, for the most part. But not particularly dramatic.”

“Did you . . .” Molly hesitates. “Were you in love with him?”

Vivian looks out the bay window. Molly follows her gaze to the Rorschach shapes of the apple trees, barely visible in the light from the house. “I can honestly say that I never regretted marrying him. But you know the rest, so I will tell you this. I did love him. But I did not love him like I loved Dutchy: beyond reason. Maybe you only get one of those in a lifetime, I don’t know. But it was all right. It was enough.”

It was all right. It was enough.
Molly’s heart clamps as if squeezed in a fist. The depth of emotion beneath those words! It’s hard for her to fathom. Feeling an ache in her throat, she swallows hard. Vivian’s resolute unsentimentality is a stance Molly understands only too well. So she just nods and asks, “So how did you and Jim end up together?”

Vivian purses her lips, thinking. “About a year after Dutchy died, Jim returned from the war and got in touch with me—he had a few small things of Dutchy’s, a pack of cards and his harmonica, that the army hadn’t already sent. And so it started, you know. It was a comfort to have someone to talk to, I think for both of us—another person who knew Dutchy.”