Slap Your Sides (9 page)

“Why don't you just leave it white?” I asked her.

“Your father won't eat it white.”

“Caesar rules,” I said.

“What did you say?” Mom looked over at me with this tired expression in her eyes, as though she was just about at the end of her rope.

“I didn't say anything. Forget it.”

“I heard you, Jubal…. I don't like you showing your father disrespect!”

“What about the way
he
acts? Sitting downstairs brooding, and when he does come up, he's got nothing nice to say to us! He mocks you by speaking the plain language to you! He just orders Tommy and me and you around: Do this, do that, no please or thank you!”

“He needs help. Particularly with heavy work. You know how hard it is for Daddy to ask for help.”

“Since when can't he do heavy work? He's getting a paunch, you know. Maybe he needs more exercise.”

“No,” Mom said sharply. “That's not what he needs. He needs to rest.”

“From what? From his duties as air-raid warden? That's about all the exercise he gets. How long since
he's been to meeting?”

He hadn't been there in months. Tommy and Mom and I rarely missed a Sunday. He stayed down in his cellar retreat, where the only one who ever went to see what he was doing was Mahatma.

Mom rinsed her hands. She turned around and faced me with an angry look. It matched the spirit of the sudden clap of thunder not too far away. “Daddy's not well, Jubal! He's got problems in his body as well as his spirit. Doctor Sincerbeaux called me and told me Daddy's heart misses beats.”

“I'm sorry, Mom.”

“I know you're making good money at the Harts', and I know you're sending some to Bud,” Mom said. “That's fine. I'm proud of you. But you have to help
here.
Before you volunteer to paint that school, you should find out what needs to be done
here
!”

A jagged edge of lightning lit up the sky outside. It was the answer to our prayers: a heavy rain starting down.

I said, “Mom, make a list. Put everything that needs doing on it.”

“Thanks, Jubal…. Tommy will help too, although he goes to the store right after school every day.”

“I don't need Tommy's help,” I said. “He does enough as it is.”

She said, “Be patient with Daddy. Today of all days, try to understand what it's been like for him.”

“What happened today?”

“You've been at the Harts'. The neighbors have been up and down the block telling everyone.”

“Telling everyone what, Mom?”

That was when I found out why Radio Dan had been trying to get in touch with Daria. It was the first I heard that Dean Daniel had been killed in the central Pacific, on one of the Gilbert Islands.

I remembered when Dean was a junior counselor at Camp Quannacut, how he'd screamed when he saw a daddy longlegs in his sneaker…. And I remembered seeing him hoist his seabag onto his shoulder, and wave good-bye in the Trenton train station, the same night Bud left for his CPS camp.

T
he next afternoon, a Sunday, I carried a macaroni-and-cheese casserole down the street to the Daniels.

It was received through a crack in the door by Daria's mother, with no invitation to come inside.

“Here's Jubal now!” my mother said into the telephone as I got back home. “Jubal? It's Darie Daniel.”

“I'm sorry about Dean,” I said.

“Thank you very much,” she said, and I knew from her tone of voice she wasn't alone. “But I wish you would come now and take back this casserole. We aren't comfortable accepting it, Jubal. We don't want anything from Bud Shoemaker's house, particularly now.”

Mom could hear me, so I just said, “Whatever you say.”

“The casserole will be on our front porch for you to pick up immediately.”

There was a click.

“She's such a nice girl,” my mother said. “What did she want?”

“We were going horseback riding later,” I lied. “Naturally she can't keep the date.”

I used walking Mahatma as an excuse to retrieve the dish. There was a row of hedges a few doors down, and
I emptied the contents into the branches for the birds.

Back at our house Mom was reading the Bible in the living room. Dad was at the dining-room table, drinking coffee and looking over the Sunday newspapers.

I washed the casserole dish and hid it under some mixing bowls.

Then I went back and sat by Dad.

“Did you see the latest from Orland Gish?” he asked me.

Orland Gish sometimes took out ads in the Philadelphia newspapers. They'd be full page, and they'd quote pacifists like A. A. Milne, author of the Pooh series for children; Albert Schweitzer; Gandhi; and Henry David Thoreau. Sometimes I'd think thank God for him, because he was a prosperous Mennonite farmer with a lot of land, the kind of man people respected and admired. Not a coconut.

Dad passed me a full page toward the back of
The Philadelphia Compass
.

WAR BULLETINS

• Probably the heaviest casualties since the war began have been on the Russian front, where in the first year of the war 3,500,000 Germans were killed.
  
• Soviet losses in the first year of the war were estimated between 8,000,000 and 10,000,000 dead; 3,000,000 missing,
  wounded, or held prisoner.
  
• Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee told the House of Commons (June 1942) that the total military casualties of the British Empire for the past two years of the war were 48,973 killed; 46,363 wounded; and 8,458 held prisoner.
  
• 25,000 defenders of Bataan killed by Japanese on 65-mile march to prisoners-of-war camp, another 22,000 died in first two months there.
  
• 5,188 Japanese killed (by actual count) in the Tulagi-Guadalcanal campaign.
  

DYING TO HEAR MORE?

PRAY FOR PEACE

 

Dad stayed in the dining room most of the afternoon, rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals with Tommy. They listened to the game on the radio Tommy and I shared.

I sneaked out and cleaned the garage, #1 on Mom's
task list. I kept thinking about Daria, remembering what she'd said yesterday when we were leaving the Harts'.
We're lucky, Jubal…lucky, lucky, lucky.

All I could do now was wait, see if she'd come to the farm next Saturday. See if she'd call in the meantime.

I worked until sundown. When I went back inside, the game was over but Dad was still sitting at the dining-room table, drinking a hot chocolate that Tommy had made for him. Mom was in the living room knitting in that fast, nervous way of hers when something was upsetting her.

Mr. Hart had just phoned to tell the family that Abel had escaped from prison. There was an all-points bulletin out for him.

“We were waiting for you before we called Bud.” Tommy handed me a cup of cocoa.

“I suppose Abel will show up at the farm,” I said.

Dad said, “That will be the last place he'll go if there's anything left of his mind.”

“They think he went south,” Tommy said. “Back to Florida, maybe.”

True, I had never taken to Abel. But I hoped he wouldn't be caught by any southern police. I had an idea they'd go harder on him. Even though every southern writer seemed to be fond of crazies (at Friends School we were just reading Carson McCullers'
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
), they were
their
crazies, not crazies from up north who didn't want to fight in the war.

T
hat Christmas was the first year Natalia didn't come to Pennsylvania with Aunt Lizzie. Natalia had been on a rigid diet, Lizzie told us, but she wanted to keep the reason secret until she could tell us herself.

I figured she'd finally found a boyfriend; should I try and get Tommy's favorite socks back?

Natalia had sent Tommy a tie from Brooks Brothers in New York, and I got two books. One was an old novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Tender Is the Night
, with a paper clip marking one page. The other was
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
sans paper clip.

Lizzie had given me two books, too, both by Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize war reporter.

Sunday morning we all went off to Friends, except for my father.

I stood outside the meetinghouse for a while with Tommy. He smoked a Camel with the long cigarette holder Lizzie had bought him for Christmas. She'd found it at Dunhill. She said it was identical to the one President Roosevelt had.

I was hoping for a glimpse of Daria. She'd be attending St. Peter's across the street. Already the organ music was thundering through the stained-glass windows, and
families were hurrying inside. They always began promptly at nine, while we started gathering in a random way until the room seemed full, and even then sometimes no one spoke for ten or twenty more minutes.

“Shall I light another Camel?” Tommy asked me. “Or do you think maybe Darie's already inside?”

She hadn't been to the Harts' since Dean's death. The only times I saw her were evenings when I'd walk Mahatma down the street. Sometimes she'd be standing by the piano, singing, while her mother played. Sometimes she'd be sitting at the desk in the living room. I'd see the back of her long brown hair. Instead of two blue stars in the window, one was gold now, since Dean had been killed.

Radio Dan hadn't done what I thought he would. He hadn't poured it on, or tried to milk the situation. In a quieter, more solemn tone than usual, he talked about Dean. His love of music. His stamp collection. He mentioned that he'd been an Eagle Scout and a Sea Scout.

“Now among the honors he received, among the awards, there will be a Medal of Honor. God bless my boy, and God bless you for your cards and letters.”

 

Right after word of Dean's death, I'd spent almost an hour at Sweet Creek Cards and Stationery trying to find the right sympathy card. One was more awful than the other, but the worst showed a figure disappearing into some clouds, with the line under it advising, “He is not
dead—he is just away….” He's
both
, I thought.

I finally bought a card with nothing more on the front than a gold cross. Inside it, I wrote:

I'd gone into the diner a few times, and I'd even dropped in on The Teen Canteen, in the basement of St. Peter's, because a friend from school saw her there one night. There was never any sign of her. Tommy said she was at Sweet Creek High every day, but she disappeared when she saw him coming. She had won a school essay contest about the medal awarded Dean posthumously. An officer in a Marine dress uniform had come to the Daniels' with it, and at St. Peter's there'd been a short memorial service during which Mrs. Daniel had been presented with a folded flag.

 

For Christmas I'd bought Daria a five-dollar bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. Tommy handed it to her just before school went on vacation. He told her it was from me. He said she'd looked flustered, thanked him, then run off in the other direction.

 

I knew that at meeting Lizzie was going to get after the Quakers, and I looked down at my shoes while she did. She quoted A. A. Milne, who had done an about-face and come out with a book called
War with Honour.

Bud said Milne had stunned COs everywhere and
put a deep wound in pacifist morale.

Lizzie had a long red feather on her hat pointed down toward her chin.

“‘One man's fanaticism has cancelled rational argument,'” she began, and several Friends glared up at her. She sank one hand into the pocket of her jacket, the new kind called an Eisenhower.

She continued reading. “‘This is a war for the destruction of all Christian and civilised values. Not a war between nations, but a war between Good and Evil. Hitler is the self-elected, self-confessed anti-Christ! Evil is his God.'”

While there was strong pacifist sentiment among all Sweet Creek Quakers, Bud was the only one who'd chosen the 4E classification over the 1AO. Some of the congregation's eligible fathers and sons were already in the service, nearly all as noncombatants.

Still, no one spoke up. Lizzie had the floor and the last word.

 

If the Sweet Creek Friends were probably resigned to the annual tongue-lashing from Lizzie, Dad was not. Just when he seemed to be calmer—we hadn't had any yellow Ys on our store windows for months—Lizzie'd arrived, dukes up, as usual.

Dad sliced the ham with a hard frown as Lizzie attacked him for not knowing a certain popular song had been composed by a Jew.

“Not that you would know anything Jews do, or have
done to them” was the next thing to come out of her mouth. I think she was a little tight from the Mumm's champagne she'd opened for herself before we'd sat down. She was smiling, but her words were harsh. “If you cared at all, why would you be serving ham to me?”

“Why wouldn't I be serving it to thee?” Dad's voice was mocking.

Mom said, “Lizzie, Tommy chose the menu. You know he always cooks for First Day.”

“Lizzie,” Tommy said, “I didn't think you or Mike observed dietary laws of any kind.”

“Sweetie pie, we don't. Forget it.” She raised her glass. She was the only one drinking. She said, “Forget it, forget them, already forgotten in Hitler's concentration camps, soon to go up in smoke—pffft!” A big swallow of champagne.

Tommy said, “Hey, Lizzie, it's Christmastime!”

“Oh, let her continue to run off at the mouth,” said Dad. “She's been living too long with those who don't celebrate Christmas.”

“What do you mean by that, Efram?” Lizzie's eyes were afire.

“I have never heard that people of the Jewish persuasion celebrate Christmas.”

“Dad!” Tommy cried.

“I don't celebrate Christmas either, Efram,” Mom said.

I said, “He didn't mean that the way it sounded.”

“I'm not eating at the table with you, Efram
Shoemaker!” Lizzie got up and flounced into the living room. Next, Dad stood up and walked into the kitchen, then down the cellar stairs.

Mom started to move, and Tommy put his hand over hers.

“No,” he said gently. “We're going to finish dinner. I cooked all last night for you. Let's not make a molehill into a mountain.”

Then Lizzie's head poked around the corner. “Some molehill! Did he go?”

“He
happens to be my husband, Lizzie,” Mom said.

“Oh, honey, that's not your fault. Love is blind, Winnie, dear.”

 

I felt sorry for Dad. I took him a plate of ham, potatoes, and cabbage, and another filled with animal cookies, springerles, and sandtarts, Pennsylvania Dutch specialties baked by Mom.

He was sitting in an old rocker with the springs busting from the bottom, not far from the black monster furnace with an appetite for coal second to no other. Around the back of the room were all the vegetables and fruits Mom had canned, and in the center was the workbench with the jigsaw Dad and Bud had used when they'd made venetian blinds for every room in the house.

“Tommy told me you had a girlfriend, Jubal. Then he told me you didn't.”

“I never really did, Dad.”

“The little Daniel girl?”

“Daria. But she was never my girlfriend. We were just real close.”

“And her father didn't approve, I bet.”

“No. He didn't. You know Radio Dan. ‘Slap your sides if you're off to war.'”

“I know Dan Daniel Senior. I know that he's a good man. We're all good men, Jubal. We're good, decent, God-fearing men. This war can't change that.”

“Wasn't he one of the ones who snubbed you at Rotary?”

“Dan is my neighbor, on both the street where I live and the one where I work. We always say hello. We don't shake hands or have conversations anymore, but we certainly do what would be embarrassing for neighbors not to do.”

“I don't think he's fit to polish Bud's shoes. That's how all this started. What did he ever do to make
him
so high and mighty?”

“He gave a son. What more can a man do?”

“You're mixing him up with God, Dad.”

“Perhaps…. I wish someone would tell me why your aunt Lizzie feels she's been appointed to represent everyone on the planet who happens to be of the Jewish persuasion.”

“I think she just gets enraged because no one in America seems to care what's happening to the Jews,” I said. “At school we learned this country even refused a ship of Jewish refugees in 1940. We wouldn't even let Jews come in as temporary visitors.”

Dad stabbed the ham with his fork. “Don't say Jews! It isn't polite,” he said.

“We wouldn't let people of the Jewish persuasion even come in as temporary visitors. I read up on it, Dad. Lizzie's right about a lot of stuff!”

Dad wasn't going to argue.

He chewed his dinner for a while, then said, “I remember the summer you went to Cub Scout camp and Dean Daniel went home because he was afraid of spiders.”

“I thought of the same thing, Dad.”

“Well, he ran into something a lot more fear-inspiring than arachnids. Those filthy Japs got him! Filthy slant eyes got him!”

I'd never heard that kind of talk from my father. At SCFS we were taught to avoid name-calling, that war was no excuse to make the enemy seem different from us. We had to realize if we chose to go to war, we chose to kill people just like us.

“I remember that night at the Trenton station,” Dad said.

“How did you feel that night, Dad?”

“Ashamed and embarrassed for myself, and for Bud.” Dad shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “I couldn't help it.”

“I think we all felt funny. Some Quakers.”

“I'm nobody's Quaker. I just went along with your mother.”

“I wish you'd be with her more now,” I said. I'd never
said anything of the kind to him before, and I regretted it immediately. He gave me a look. Then he put his plate on the table beside him, got up, and went across to get the coal bucket and the shovel.

“Chilly in here,” he said. “Go up and tell your mother that Hope called while you were at meeting. She's calling again tonight, between nine and ten.”

“What a thrill!” I said, but Dad wasn't in a mood to kid around about Hope, as we used to. He wasn't buying any more intimacy. When I tried to take the coal shovel from his hand, he said, “Do as I told you, Jubal.”