The Girl from Charnelle (19 page)

T
he letter came in the afternoon mail. It was postmarked from West Germany, and all of them waited anxiously for their father to get home. When he did, they thrust it in his face, but he just studied the envelope for a minute and then set it down on the kitchen table.

“Aren't you going to open it?” Gene asked, incredulous.

“Soon enough,” Mr. Tate said. Laura saw the smile at the corner of his lips as he turned away, and she knew he was merely keeping them in suspense.

“Supper ready, Laura?” he asked.

“Almost.”

He took a shower! She finished heating the leftover ham, green beans, and applesauce, put a plate of buttered bread on the table, and Manny stuck the letter onto a fork and placed it on their father's plate.

Oh, how he took his time. They heard him shaving, singing to himself in the bathroom. Cruel! Finally he came into the kitchen. Manny, Rich, and
Gene were seated. Laura stood by the icebox. Her father's hair was wet and slicked back. He looked down at the plate, where the letter lay, and smiled. He sat, picked it up, studied it.

“Where are my reading glasses?”

“Here,” Gene said.

Gene and Rich leaned in, and Laura stepped closer. Her father put on his glasses and lifted the envelope into the light from the window, then turned it over. He put his knife to the back and slit it halfway, then stopped.

“Let's say the blessing.”

“What?” Manny exclaimed.

Mr. Tate folded his hands.

“Open the damn thing,” Manny said. They laughed.

“Manny, you can lead us tonight.”

“When was the last time we said a blessing?”

Mr. Tate opened his palms on either side of him and smiled serenely. “Laura, Rich, hold my hands. Now, Manny, I know it's been a long time since you've conversed with the Almighty, but it's really very simple. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven…'”

“You're a ruthless—”

“‘…
hallowed
be Thy name.'”

“God is good, God is sweet,” Manny chanted, “open the letter and then we'll eat.”

Gene and Rich fell into a fit of giggles. Laura smiled but looked anxiously at her father. She wanted that letter read as much as anybody.

“Read it,” Manny said and tipped his chair back so that he was perched precariously against the wall. “Pretty please.”

Her father smiled, picked up the letter, sliced through the rest of the seal, took out two handwritten sheets, and began reading it. Silently.

“What does it say?” Gene asked.

Laura went behind him, wrapped her arms around his neck. “Is she coming?”

He held the letter close to his chest so that Laura couldn't read and then he continued without saying a word, but his expressions changed melodramatically. His eyes grew wide. Then his mouth dropped, and he wrinkled his face up into a comic boo-hoo.

“Well, what's it say?” Manny smirked.

He hesitated a beat before saying, deadpan, “They'll be here for the Fourth of July.”

“Next week?” she asked.

“Looks like it.”

“Yahoo!” Gene yelled. Manny beat his fists on the table so the silverware rattled.

“Careful,” Laura said.

“She's coming home! She's coming home!” Rich screamed, although Laura wondered if he even remembered Gloria. He'd seen the postcards and heard the other letters. But he was a toddler when she left.

“Are they all coming?” Manny asked.

“Yep,” Mr. Tate said. “Jerome has a two-week furlough.” Laura was surprised to hear him say Jerome's name. It sounded strange coming from his lips, and she figured he was trying to get used to it himself.

“Where will they sleep?” Gene asked, suddenly worried.

“Don't worry, son. We'll figure it out.”

 

Except for occasional pictures, they had not seen Gloria since she eloped. She had tried to come home several times, but Jerome's furloughs kept getting shortened or canceled. Or she was pregnant and couldn't travel overseas.

Laura remembered how furious her father had been with Gloria when she first eloped, even forbade her name to be spoken, threatened to have the pilot arrested or, more outlandishly, court-martialed, but their mother had calmed him down. And after a while his anger subsided, though, before Laura's mother left, he didn't like to talk much about what Gloria had done, and if the subject came up, he'd scowl or leave the room.

He was not a man easily angered, though they all had seen and knew him to be capable of a startling rage. Once, years ago when Mr. Thomason caught Manny shoplifting at the general store, Mr. Tate had whipped him viciously with a belt for almost five minutes, a torturously long time for a whipping, as the rest of them listened in shock in the living room. Manny was quiet at first, but then he cried out and then screamed in pain.

“You ever gonna do that again?”

“No!” Manny whimpered.

“What?”

“No, sir!” and the beating went on until Manny was so tired he could scream no more. Their mother walked into the room. She said nothing, but her silent presence was enough to stop the whipping. And then she came back into the living room where the rest of them sat with their heads down, too afraid and ashamed to look at each other or her. They looked up when their father emerged from the room moments later, the belt in his hand, scowling. They could hear Manny in the bedroom, sobbing.

“What are y'all looking at?” They cast their eyes down again.

That was the worst incident. They never saw him that enraged again, not even much later, right after their mother left, though his whippings were plenty hard, even when doled out judiciously, and you didn't push him.

A few months after their mother left, Mr. Tate finally forgave Gloria. It was difficult to harbor a grudge against her forever. He spoke of her almost as his favorite child, and when others mentioned Jerome's name—which they generally avoided doing in his presence—he no longer frowned, though he still referred to him only as “the pilot.”

Gloria had two children now—Julie, who was two, and the baby, Carroll, a boy's name that Mr. Tate thought too girlish. There had been postcards and letters, which they eagerly awaited. Gloria was a good letter writer. She had a way of depicting herself in a comical light, punctuated by lyrical passages that suggested an intelligent sensitivity, and her letters lived vividly in their imagination, as if she had been designated as the family traveler, the one who sends back news to the home front.

“The life of an air force pilot's wife,” Gloria wrote in one of her letters, “is full of glamour and glory.” Then she contrasted the wonder of visiting magnificent places—the Mediterranean, Italy, Greece, and Switzerland—with the reality of moving from one base to another, the housing too small (“we've moved into a
lovely
little closet”), the dirt everywhere (“the air force has a policy of shipping all bomb rubble to the junior pilot houses—gives the wives something to do”), the bugs (“flying cockroaches,” “horse-flies the size of Oklahoma,” “mosquitoes who decided to picnic on my legs”), the mediocre base food (“I'd rather kiss Nikita Khrushchev than eat another canned tomato”), the pecking order of not only pilots and officers but also of officers' wives (“who seem to get fat from swallowing pretty little idiots like me”).

“Europeans do not believe in ice,” she said in another letter and depicted
a week-long expedition to get a simple cube for her tea. And then suddenly, in the middle of this riff, she wrote, “Often I find myself imagining Jerome crashing or being shot down. At night when he's gone, I sometimes go outside and study the sky. The shooting stars fill me with dread. I dream of him in flames. I sometimes don't believe it when I hear that he's arrived safely back to base. I hold my breath until I see him upright, smiling. I know we're not at war, but it doesn't feel that way in West Germany.”

Gloria wrote letters to each of them at first, but a year and a half ago, she had taken to writing one letter every month, addressed to their father, although the salutation read, “Dear Everybody.” Mr. Tate would read the letter slowly or have Manny or Laura read it aloud, as they sat in the living room or at the kitchen table, and then afterward everybody could read the letter again, privately. Gloria would single out each person for a paragraph, asking questions:

“Manny, are you still dating Joannie? Keep that girl. You're lucky she puts up with you.”

“Have you lost a tooth, Rich?”

“Gene, are you making Rich give you half the bed?”

“Does Sam Compson's little brother still have a crush on you, Laura?”

When their father finally wrote and told her about the disappearance of their mother, almost a year after it happened and when it seemed clear that she really had left them for good, Gloria didn't write back for several months. When at last they got a letter, it was full of listless details about where they had been restationed, but at the end of the letter, in a postscript, she wrote, “Is she
really gone
???”

After that, Gloria didn't mention it very often, but in the middle of another letter, she wrote, “It doesn't seem real to me that Momma left. You speak of it as a fact that you're used to in your letters, but I can't imagine it, not really.” In another she wrote, “Sometimes I look up while I'm out walking, and I will hear an American voice, a woman's voice, and I swear it's Momma's. But it's not. Just some trick. A tourist or another military wife. But it
feels
real. I might cry for the rest of the day then.”

She and Jerome had moved three times in as many months. The Tates would get postcards with strange, riddling thoughts on them. “Dresden is a city of ghosts,” said one. A letter she wrote when she was pregnant with Carroll ended with this: “Jerome flying over Austria. The days gray and short and always full of drizzle or this strange ashy snow. Julie has mumps
and blames me, shoots me looks that say, ‘I hate you.' I vomited four times today. I understand now why Momma left.”

When she visited Berlin, she had been walking down the street early one morning. There was fog, and she had seen a man climbing the drain-pipe on a tenement wall. The man looked at her. “Shots rang out,” she wrote, “and I swear the man's eyes went dead before me. I was the last thing on this earth that he saw. Me, a pregnant American woman in the fog. What do I do with that?”

Mr. Tate was strangely quiet after these letters and postcards, never once talking about their mother. Afterward he either left for a while or busied himself in the backyard.

Just after Easter, they got a long, chatty letter that was brimming with details about her pregnancy: “medicine-ball belly,” “eating like a horse,” “the base doctor has the bedside manner of a drill sergeant.” The tone was cheerier. It was spring. She had more energy. They were still stationed in West Germany, where she had more friends in similar circumstances: “The base is full of pregnant women. The joke (not a very funny one) is that they've herded us here like prisoners of war. They pretend to be happy for us, but a couple of the women are spooked about taking a shower! Afraid they'll be gassed. Can you believe it? Me, I prefer a bath anyway. Lets me float the medicine ball. I despise gravity! If Isaac Newton were on this base with all these pregnant women, there'd be a lynching!”

Later in the letter, she wrote, “This election has people buzzing. All the older pilots and officers are pulling for Dick Nixon. They believe the Democrats are soft eggheads like Stevenson. (They use worse language, but I won't repeat it since I'm a
lady
.) They all love Ike and call Nixon ‘Baby Ike.' There's a staff sergeant who roots openly for Lyndon Johnson, and he can get away with it because he's from Texas, though we all know that Johnson looks about as soft as a crocodile. I suppose I'd root for him, too, if he ever gets around to getting officially in the race. It
would
be good to have a Texan in the White House. But those ears have
got
to go! (Sorry, Daddy, but they look like cooked cauliflower attached to the sides of his head!) All the wives nod in agreement in front of their husbands, pretend to adore that lovable pooch Checkers, but when they're alone, they all moon over the bootlegger's son from Massachusetts. He
is
awful cute (right, Laura!), even if he served in the navy, goes to Sunday mass, and pronounces his
R
s like a Chinaman.”

She mentioned that she and the kids might get to come home this summer. She hoped so. “With the military, though, you don't hold your breath.”

But then they received another letter in May. “It looks good for the trip home. Maybe early July. Cross your fingers. Will write when I know.”

And now Gloria was coming for the Fourth of July. And all of them, too, even Jerome. One week with his family in Wichita Falls, the other in Charnelle.

 

Laura shared with John her excitement about Gloria's visit, reading aloud some of her letters, telling him about how her sister had eloped with Jerome and how much she missed her, how glad they all were that she was coming home again.

“You can't tell her,” he said. “You know that?”

“Yes, I know that.”

Since school let out for summer, John and Laura met twice a week, usually at lunch. He did what he called “fix-it runs” in Charnelle or nearby towns on Mondays and Thursdays and could take lunch on his own. He tried to work fast, and then he'd pick Laura up behind the old abandoned warehouse on Whipple Street, five blocks east of her house, at noon or a little before, and they would drive to his uncle's barn just outside of town until one o'clock, sometimes almost two if they were lucky. In the summer, it was pretty easy for Laura to get away during lunch, easier than in the evening; Mrs. Ambling was happy to let Rich and Gene play in her yard during the day.