Some Luck (42 page)

“We’re lucky if they are, Private.”

They caught up with Private Ruben, and the three of them squatted down and duck-walked toward the first pillbox, taking cover in darkness, frozen weeds, and a line of leafless trees. When they got right up to it, Private Ruben took out two grenades, but he didn’t pull the pins.

Which was a good thing, because the pillbox was empty and cold.
It looked like there hadn’t been a soul in there for weeks, if ever. There wasn’t even a shell casing or a piece of paper lying around. The Jerries had certainly cleaned up after themselves when they left.

An hour later, they had gone to the next one, which was a hundred yards up the river. No one and nothing there, either. When they walked back toward the bridge, they just strolled along, standing upright, sometimes trotting because of the cold, but never taking precautions—it was the ultimate test. They would get shot if there were anyone at all around to shoot them.

All the patrols reported the same thing—no one. And as the artillery and the engineers and the rest of the Seventh Army massed behind them, Frank began to get excited—Germany tomorrow, Berlin soon after that. It was the end of November. Three years of war was plenty.

By midmorning, when Frank woke up from his snooze, the invasion was ready; the Rhine was theirs. General Devers, inspecting their formations, looked eager. Frank didn’t know why the general had been assigned to take his army into the Riviera, and then march it up the Rhone, with only enough action (at least compared with Italy) to keep them sharp. They waited.

The next afternoon, when all the men had found out that they were not going, that Eisenhower himself had refused to let them go, they had several explanations. Cornhill’s was that Ike must know that there was a big force of Germans awaiting them in the backcountry across the river—it would be like the Kasserine Pass; maybe Rommel himself was there.

“Rommel is dead,” said Frank.

“Do you really believe that?” said Cornhill. “I don’t. That’s obviously a trick. Ike is being cautious, and he should be.”

Ruben took another view, that Ike was so shit-scared of the Germans that he couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes. They weren’t there, but they had been there so often that they had to be there. Ruben didn’t like Ike at all—he’d seen his type before, always saying what if, what if. “Is that the kind of guy you want in a fight?” Frank could see that Ruben and Cornhill didn’t actually disagree.

Frank simply put it down to another map problem—the army almost never knew where it was going, and they were always surprised when they found what was there. Three years of superior officers had
made him 100 percent suspicious of everything superior officers had to say. He trusted only Devers, and why was that? Devers said, “We’re going here,” and they went there. Devers said, “Expect this and that,” and this and that came to pass. But the rumor was that Ike didn’t like Devers, and Frank figured this was the reason—Devers didn’t have his head up his ass, and everyone else did.

1945

A
LL ROSANNA KNEW
was that Frank was in France and that nothing in France was good. Did he write? Was he allowed to write? He had written two letters in the summer, from Corsica, and then two more in the fall, one written in a town called Besançon, which was a kind of lace, as she remembered, and another from Lyons. In Lyons, he wrote about some Roman ruins. His letters were masterpieces of saying nothing. That he was alive was her business, what he was doing was not her business. She didn’t even know if he was involved in what they called the Battle of the Bulge (though what “the bulge” was, Rosanna could not figure out). She hoped he wasn’t, because the Battle of the Bulge was very terrible, and apparently, when the Germans found Americans or other Allies, they just shot them, didn’t even take them prisoner. They said they were going to take them prisoner in order to have them put down their weapons, and then they mowed them down. It was a good thing that Rosanna didn’t leave the farm much, because every time she went into town, people asked her how Frankie was and where he was, and Rosanna had to say that she didn’t know. Yes, her brother had stopped writing for a while after he got over there, but then he had started again, and now he wrote every week, nice long letters about this and that, some of it pretty gruesome. Angela, who had taken to her bed, was up and about now, and was typing the letters for a book. She thought
it would be a best-seller, and maybe they would make it into a movie. “That’ll be the day,” thought Rosanna, but she kept this thought to herself. Every time Angela or, for that matter, her own mother speculated about who would play Gus, Rosanna just said, “That would be good.”

In the meantime, Eloise had gotten out of the newspaper business and was working for the WPA in San Francisco. She had rented some kind of duplex there, and Rosa was in a school with all sorts of children, including Negro children and Italian children and maybe even some Japs, though Eloise was very coy about that, and Rosanna had thought that all the Japs were sent away to camps—there was one in Kansas, Rosanna thought she had heard that, but maybe not. No one talked about it. There was a POW camp up in Algona, and another one over in Clarinda, and those POWs worked the farms around there, but Rosanna thought that Joey, John, and Walter were doing fine. POWs in the neighborhood would have made her nervous.

Lillian wanted to go out to San Francisco and get a job when she graduated from high school in the spring, and Rosanna was against it, but not for the reason Walter was, which was that San Francisco was impossibly far away—three days by train. Was she going to sit up the whole way? If not, a berth was very expensive. Rosanna knew that Lillian was not quite ready to tell Walter that she could pay the fare herself. He had no idea how much she had been paid at the drugstore (he would be amazed and a little disapproving—he would certainly not have factored in tips, because Walter thought waitresses only got good tips for flirting). No, Rosanna didn’t mind the thought of Lillian having a little bit of an adventure—she would be nineteen this year, for Heaven’s sake. Rosanna was married and then pregnant when she was nineteen. What Rosanna minded was the idea that, when Lillian got to San Francisco, Eloise was not going to be the one to take her places where she could meet the right sort of man. Rosanna was sure that Eloise was continuing to consort with Jews and Italians and even Negroes, just as she did in Chicago, and what she would most likely do for Lillian was take her to some low-class neighborhoods and have her hand out leaflets about unions and meet pipe fitters and men like that. Rosanna had no beef with pipe fitters per se—every man she had ever known got his hands dirty every day of the week and most Sundays, and if her father owned a pair of shoes
rather than boots, she had never seen them. However, even though Lillian was too good for that life, she was sure to throw herself away, and Eloise wouldn’t stop her.

Rosanna had always called Lillian an “angel” and a “saint,” and so she should not have been surprised when Lillian turned out to be that very thing, but the result was that she was kindest to all the wrong girls and dated all the wrong boys. Who took her to the Christmas Dance, for example? None other than Otis Olsson, the most backward boy in the senior class, who could not drive and had to be driven by his older brother, Oscar. Why did she go with Otis? Well, she felt sorry for him. The other boys who asked her could date whoever they wanted, but Otis didn’t dare ask anyone. And why did they come home early? Well, Otis got carsick on the way over, and threw up beside the road, and that was that. And then there was the Riemann girl, who came over sometimes. Lillian helped her with her homework while the girl gazed open-mouthed at her—adenoidal for sure. Yes, Lillian had other friends, better friends, but these were the ones she seemed to value, and with only Eloise to guide her, she would surely marry someone of just the same type.

Of course, Joey was going to marry Minnie as soon as Mrs. Frederick passed away and Joey could convince Minnie to have him. It was written all over his face and body that he thought the world of Minnie, though she did look used up for her age, twenty-six now, but looking thirty if a day. And Joey not even twenty-three, but every time Rosanna saw him, it was Minnie-this and Minnie-that, and, kind boy that he was, he helped out over there, not to mention that he was practically farming the whole place. Roland Frederick had gone downhill all of a sudden, and couldn’t do a thing. Minnie would get the farm, and Joey would marry her, and so he would have the farm, and nothing wrong with that for a boy his age. But it was about as exciting as a hard frost, as Oma used to say.

Probably the best she could hope for with Frank was that he did not bring home a war bride. But she hardly dared think about it.

ON THE FIRST
of March, Hildy showed up. Hildy Bergstrom, in a blue Dodge, wearing a navy-blue suit, a stylish white hat with a
navy-blue grosgrain band, a beaver coat, and warm snow boots. She parked in the drive just off the road, made her way through the late-winter mud to the front porch, and knocked. When Rosanna spied her through the window, she thought the young woman was lost, or selling something.

She was a beautiful girl, very like Carole Lombard had been (what a sad thing that airplane crash was, still), but with four or five more inches of height, and not quite as square a jaw. She held out her hand and said, “Oh, Mrs. Langdon, I’ve been wanting to meet you for such a long time. I was in the neighborhood, and I couldn’t resist stopping by. I’m Hildy. Hildy Bergstrom. I’m Frank’s fiancée.”

Well, of course Rosanna’s eye snapped straight to her ring finger, but she had gloves on—nice ones made of white cotton with a bit of cutwork around the wrists. Rosanna took her hand, shook it, and said, “Would you like to come in? It’s rather cold out here, isn’t it? We can have some tea.”

The house, of course, was perfectly clean and neat, and not terribly ramshackle. At New Year’s, Rosanna had slipcovered the sofa with some nice green chenille, and her best afghan—ivory lace in a fan stitch—was folded over the armchair. Henry had some books around—not even thirteen, and deep into something called
The Woman in White
. Rosanna picked the book off the sofa, turned down the corner of the page, and set it on the lamp table. She saw Hildy glance at it and said, “Frank’s brother Henry is an avid reader.”

“Oh, I am, too. I love books.”

Rosanna left her looking around politely and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Making the tea took all of four minutes, just because the range was already hot, and she had boiled the kettle half an hour before. She even had sugar, cream, of course, and some lemon left over from the lemon pie she had baked over the weekend. Rosanna glanced into the windowpane beside the back door. Did she look anymore as though it was possible for her to produce a specimen like Frankie? Not much. She repinned a couple of hairpins and carried the tea and the cups and saucers into the front room. She set them down on the coffee table and sat on the sofa. Hildy gave her a bright smile. Rosanna said, “So—what brings you to our neighborhood? We’re a little out of the way.”

“Frank maybe has told you that I live in Kansas City now. Anyway, I had to go to Albert Lea, and I thought that I wouldn’t have a better opportunity to say hi, so here I am.”

“What do you do in Kansas City?”

“Oh, goodness. So many things. I love Kansas City. I’m a buyer for Halls. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s part of Hallmark Cards.”

“Is there something they need in Albert Lea?” Rosanna poured the tea. Hildy took sugar, not cream.

Hildy leaned forward. “Not on your life. I’m going to visit my cousin. He and his wife just had a baby, so I took a few days off. We’ve already bought our spring collections, so it’s a little bit of a quiet period.” She gave Rosanna another big smile, then said, “Frank talked so much about his family and the farm. I’m just thrilled to meet you. I do hope Joe, Lillian, Henry, and Claire turn up.”

That was good, Rosanna thought. She did not believe for a moment that Frank had a fiancée—not because he would have told her, but because it just wasn’t like him to be so conventional. But the young woman knew something.

“Claire should be home from school anytime now. Henry and Lillian come later.”

“I’m sure they’re very busy.”

A lull settled over the conversation. Both of them took a sip of tea.

Finally, Hildy trilled, “So—what have you heard from Frank lately?”

Rosanna looked at her straight on. “Nothing.”

Hildy’s smile brightened, then wobbled, then faded. Rosanna said, “How about you?”

Hildy said, “It’s been a while, I must say. I was getting a bit worried.”

“My brother didn’t write his wife for nine months after he went over.”

“I know he’s in …” She hesitated the barest moment then said, “France.” But, then, everyone was in France. Rosanna said, “Sometimes he writes to a girl who lives nearby. He’s known her since grammar school. She showed me a letter that said he got to the Rhine, and there was no one there, but Eisenhower wouldn’t let them go across. Very strange. That was November.” Minnie had gotten this letter, the most recent one. Rosanna pretended that she wasn’t watching Hildy very carefully. But Hildy wasn’t much of an actress. She
sighed, and her face fell. Rosanna softened her voice. “When was the last time you heard from Frankie?”