Orphan Train(73)

When Dutchy lived on the streets, he never felt as alone, he tells me, as he did growing up in Minnesota. In New York the boys were always playing practical jokes on each other and pooling their food and clothes. He misses the press of people, the noise and chaos, black Model Ts rattling along the cobblestones, the treacly smell of street vendors’ peanuts roasting in sugar.

“What about you—do you ever wish you could go back?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Our life was so hard. I don’t have many happy memories of that place.”

He pulls me close, runs his fingers along the soft white underbelly of my forearm. “Were your parents ever happy, do you think?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Pushing the hair back from my face and tracing the line of my jaw with his finger, he says, “With you I’d be happy anywhere.”

Though it’s just the kind of thing he says, I believe that it’s true. And I know, with the newfound clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstance.


ON A MILD AFTERNOON IN EARLY DECEMBER I AM AT THE STORE going over inventory orders with Margaret, the sharp-eyed accounts manager. Packing receipts and forms are all over the floor; I’m trying to decide whether to order more ladies’ trousers than last year, and looking at the popular styles in the catalog as well as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The radio is on low; swing music is playing, and then Margaret holds her hand up and says, “Wait. Did you hear that?” She hurries over to the radio and adjusts the dial.

“Repeat: this is a special report. President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air. The attack of the Japanese has also been made on all naval and military ‘activities’ on the island of Oahu. Casualty numbers are unknown.”

And like that, everything changes.

A few weeks later, Lil comes into the store to see me, her eyes red-rimmed, tears staining her cheeks. “Richard shipped out yesterday, and I don’t even know where he’s going. They just gave him a numbered mailing address that doesn’t tell me anything.” Sobbing into a crumpled white handkerchief, she says, “I thought this stupid war was supposed to be over by now. Why does my fiancé have to go?” When I hug her, she clings to my shoulder.

Wherever you look are posters encouraging sacrifice and support for the war effort. Many items are rationed—meat, cheese, butter, lard, coffee, sugar, silk, nylon, shoes; our entire way of business changes as we work with those flimsy blue booklets. We learn to make change for ration stamps, giving red point tokens as change for red stamps (for meat and butter) and blue point tokens for blue stamps (processed foods). The tokens are made of compressed wood fiber, the size of dimes.

In the store we collect ladies’ lightly used stockings for use in parachutes and ropes, and tin and steel for scrap and metal drives. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” is constantly on the radio. I shift our purchasing to reflect the mood, ordering gift cards and blue onionskin airmail letter forms by the gross, dozens of American flags in all sizes, beef jerky, warm socks, decks of playing cards to go in care packages to ship overseas. Our stock boys shovel driveways and deliver groceries and packages.

Boys from my graduating class are signing up and shipping out, and every week there’s a farewell potluck dinner in a church basement or the lobby of the Roxy or in someone’s home. Judy Smith’s boyfriend, Douglas, is one of the first. The day he turns eighteen he goes down to the recuiter’s office and presents himself for service. Hotheaded Tom Price is next. When I run into him on the street before he leaves, he tells me that there’s no downside—the war’s an open door to travel and adventure, with a good bunch of guys to mess around with and a salary. We don’t talk about the danger—but what I imagine is a cartoon version, bullets flying and each boy a superhero, running, invincible, through a spray of gunfire.

Fully a quarter of the boys from my class volunteer. And when the draft begins, more and more pack up to leave. I feel sorry for the boys with flat feet or severe asthma or partial deafness who I see in the store after their buddies are gone, aimlessly wandering the aisles. They seem lost in their ordinary civilian clothes.

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.

THE DAY DUTCHY LEAVES FOR FORT SNELLING IN HENNEPIN 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.”