Chapter 40 #2
On December 26, with the whole family gathered at breakfast, Harry informed us that he’d signed up for the Marines four days after Pearl Harbor and had passed his physical on December 22.
He had scored high on the armed forces qualification test, guaranteeing him training in any specialty he chose, but he didn’t want to be in a support position.
He wanted to be a grunt, trained to fight and given every opportunity to fight.
He expected to be told to report for boot camp after the new year.
“I didn’t tell you,” he explained, “because I didn’t want to cast another shadow on this Christmas.
” He was twenty, saturated in history and military lore.
We’d known he would seek to serve, but we hadn’t asked him what his intentions were.
I suspect, in our hearts, we hoped he would pursue a military exemption in order to work with his parents on their Department of War projects.
Of course that could never have happened.
That was not Harry. For all his enthusiasm for such things as the adventures of the Clyde Tombaugh Club and his quickness to engage in silly banter, there had always been a somber side to him that he did his best to keep from us in the interest of being the fun brother that we wanted him to be.
We didn’t get teary-eyed at that breakfast, because he wouldn’t want that reaction.
We were proud of him, and it was our job to express our pride without embarrassing him.
In a time of war, the pride you feel for someone you love, someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, inevitably comes tangled with other powerful emotions—fear, anger at those who broke the peace, choking disquiet at the unpredictable nature of life, and a tenderness without pity, a tenderness so intense that I have no words to describe it.
I cried in bed that night. I cried, but not in excess, for it seemed that indulging in too much sorrow would tempt fate to punish my intemperance with a better reason for grief.
On December 29, Harry received his notice to present himself at the induction center on the morning of Wednesday, January 14, 1942.
Isadora had canceled a two-week gig in San Francisco to be with us.
In his remaining days at home, Harry wanted no special treatment, only to have every breakfast and dinner with all of us, to play cards with his “three sisters,” and to watch some films with us in the Bram’s screening room—a little Chaplin, a little more Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, W.
C. Fields, and Abbott and Costello in Buck Privates, which had just hit theaters in ’41.
He spent time with Loretta and Franklin, brainstorming propaganda films aimed at the nation’s enemies overseas and those at home.
Rafael received his share of attention, chasing tennis balls on the great lawn and splashing with his “brother” in the swimming pool.
The weather was mild for January. On his last weekend, Harry carried a chair through the jungle in the conservatory, into the grotto, up the hidden stairs, through the midnight-blue door with its silvery moon ringed by stars, past the six-foot-tall mirrored obelisk, and placed it at the western parapet, where he could sit with a view of the suburbs beyond these hills and the great city that seemed to go on forever.
He spent time there every evening before he went to bed.
On his last night at home, I was waiting in a chair of my own, which I’d placed beside his. As he sat down, I said, “Do you mind?”
“Mind your company? Yours is far better than mine, Addie.”
I said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“The city? Yes. More beautiful at a distance than close up, but that’s true of a lot of things, including most movie stars.”
“You never sat up here like this before.”
“Because I thought the city would always be there.”
“Won’t it be?”
“It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. But I am. So I’m just sort of storing up the sight of it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go.”
“It’s okay, sis. I’ll be home in eleven weeks, after boot, for a visit. When this thing is won and over, I’ll be back for good and bore your butt off with my war stories.”
“If your stories are really boring, Gertie can polish them for you. She’s going to be something.”
“She always has been—and so have you.”
After watching the moon shed a cloud, I said, “Maybe Izzy will do USO tours and one day be in a show at some overseas base where you are.”
“Wouldn’t that be something. But I’d rather she keep on doing what she’s been doing here. She moves you out of yourself when she sings, and you forget what had you down. People stateside are going to need that every bit as much as anyone.”
Although the night was calm there on the roof, wind flowed at higher altitudes, reclothing the moon.
“Everyone has something important to give,” I said, “but all I’ve got is putting together care packages.”
“You’ve already done more than anyone, Addie. Maybe not for the war effort, but for all of us at Bramley Hall.”
“That’s lovely of you to say and sweet to hear.”
He fixed me with his starlit eyes. “Those aren’t just pretty words. It’s true. None of us would be who we are if you had never come aboard.”
“Aboard. The Bram is something like an ocean liner, isn’t it? A big beautiful ship that makes every day feel a little bit like a holiday.”
“And it almost sank one day in 1934, but for you.”
His words briefly perplexed me, but then I was discomfited when I realized to what he must be referring. Pretending ignorance in order to avoid a lie, I said, “Oh, yes. The day I ate only my share of Chef’s pastries rather than half of everything he baked.”
He reached out with his right hand and took my left. “Gertie really is something, and she’s going to become something even more wonderful. Because you gave her the chance.”
“How do you know about that? I mean, if there’s anything to know about, which I’m not saying there is.”
“I never knew until this past September. There’s one day every September when I take Lynette flowers from the garden and we sit talking for a while.”
I said, “The anniversary of the day that her daughter died of influenza.”
“I never knew about that until the day the Symingtons left and Victoria told me, the day Lynette became the estate manager. Libby has been gone twenty-three years, but every year on the day of, it seems to Lynette that the loss was yesterday. Evidently Gertie much reminds her of Libby. For some reason, Lynette was more emotional this year than usual. As she reminisced about Libby, she began also remembering things Gertie had said and done—then suddenly she was talking about you and that day at the hospital. I know she swore to keep your secret, but I’m so glad she opened up to me.
Don’t blame her, Addie. She said you were afraid if people knew about your gift, you would be a freak twice over.
It half broke my heart to hear that. You’re not twice a freak.
You’re not a freak at all. You’re one of my three sisters, each of you unique, all three of you the best. I promise to keep your secret, but only because you’re my sister and you want me to. ”
I don’t know how long I was unable to speak.
He held my hand and waited. What a good man he was already, at twenty.
What a fine Marine he would make, devoted to the protection of others.
At last I found my voice. “I don’t know how I did it, only that I could.
I felt less like the cause than like the instrument through which some other power was working.
At the time, there were several important reasons why it seemed I should keep it secret.
Seven years later, the only one that matters as much is Gertie.
I don’t want her to know that she would have died in that very half hour.
I don’t want her to feel she owes me anything.
I want her to hit me with those smart-ass comments that make me laugh.
When I make a suggestion about one of the stories she writes, I don’t want her to take it just because she thinks of me as Saint Adiel or something.
I want her to feel comfortable saying, ‘Stuff it, Maxwell Perkins, and go edit your boy Hemingway’s work into ruin. ’ You understand, Harry?”
“Yes. Of course. My lips are sealed, but in return for behaving with more discretion than is my nature, may I ask, just this once, after all these years, if it doesn’t make you too uncomfortable, may I ask to hold your hand without the glove between us?”
“It won’t be pleasant,” I warned him.
“As a young boy, I sometimes held the hand of my teacher, Miss Imogene Blackthorn, whom you may remember. Although she turned out to be a eugenics enthusiast and generally nasty piece of work, I somehow survived. You flatter yourself to think you could be even five percent as repulsive as she was.”
“Miss Blackthorn was not a star of the Museum of the Strange. For you, dear brother, I’ll deep-six the word freak. But we can’t ignore the fact that for many years I was boldly billed as a ‘human oddity,’ and no one ever accused Captain of false advertising.”
I took off my glove and counted on the low light of the moon to minimize the visual impact if not the tactile shock. He took my hand once more and held it for a moment and said, “Well, thus far I have survived.”
We sat there for more than another hour, each of us with much to say before Franklin and Loretta drove him to the induction center in the morning.
Sometimes, depending on the subject of discussion, we held each other tighter than at other times, but not once did he recoil from my touch.
When the time came for him to go to his room and pack what little he was permitted to take to the training center in San Diego, he kissed my hand and released it.
As I worked my fingers into the glove, Harry said, “You are in fact a human oddity, sis, but for one reason only. You’re far more human and humane than ninety-five percent of the species.”
I slept that night, but restlessly. In the morning, Harry had left for the induction center in Los Angeles.