An Owl's Whisper (35 page)

“So,
Madame
Cowboy, do you arrive early to enjoy some parts of my city before now? Perhaps the
Louvre
? “Or the nightclubs?” She winked. “Or the artist cafés on
Montmartre
?”

Eva took a long drag on her cigarette and dropped it into her half-full Pepsi bottle. She blew smoke toward the ceiling. “No, I arrived only this morning on the train. It’s stuffy in here. I need some air.” She got up and left.

At precisely 1:30, a WAC officer skipped to the front of the room, her overseas cap bouncing on a cushion of auburn hair. Her lipstick was red as pomegranate. Holding a megaphone, she said in strange English, “Welcome, Ladies. I am Captain Hope Bonheur. Y’all are 117 ladies about to set off on a great adventure. An adventure leading to a new life! So go ahead, give y’selves a big hand.” Hope raised her hands over her head and clapped, which brought a round of giggles and applause. “As y’all can tell, my accent is unique. I’m from the jewel of the South, the great state of Louisiana. It’s named after a Frenchman, one of those Louis kings. I never remember which one. My hometown is New Orleans—French name again, ladies. We speak a dialect called Cajun, a descendant of the French language, because it was Frenchmen brought The Big Easy civilization.” Hope bowed. “For that we thank y’all mighty kindly!” Applause rippled. She spoke in Cajun for the women. To Eva, it was French mauled with a hammer then drizzled with honey.

“Y’all are one of two groups who will travel to America together. Tomorrow one hundred eight other ladies will be in these seats, doing just what y’all are doing. Today they’re next door having a class I call America 101. Tomorrow y’all will swap places with them and have that introduction to American livin’. Then the next day we travel by bus to the port of Le Havre, and that afternoon we sail on the good ship SS Pocahontas for New York harbor. We’ll have US Army Nurse Helen Bleck along, to make sure y’all arrive in one piece. And I’ll warn you, from the moment you set foot on the Pocahontas, there will be only English spoken. If I catch y’all speaking Dutch or French or whatever else, you’ll miss a meal!” Hope held her stern look for a few seconds. She told the story of Pocahontas, even stretching things a bit, calling her the first American war bride. “So here it is, ladies: Two hundred twenty-five Pocahontases, the crew, Nurse Bleck, and me. Speaking English! We gonna have us a time!” Hope thrust her fist in the air. “Yeee-Haaa!” It was the first rebel yell the brides had ever heard, and Hope had them practice it three times, including the fist pump with the third. The war brides loved it.

As Hope left the front of the room, Eva ran up and took her hands. “Captain Hope, you can’t know how happy your talk of a new life makes me. Thank you.”

Hope beamed. “Sugar, you’re welcomed. These last years been tough, huh?”

Eva looked at the floor.

“So, what’s your name and where you headed, sweetie?”

“I’m Eva, Mrs. Stanley Chandler, and I go to the Sandy Hills in the center.”

“Sandy Hills? Is that a town? Can’t say I recall a place called that.”

“It is in the center, in the Hooker’s district Stanley says.”

Hope looked worried. “Got your paperwork, shug?” She opened Eva’s folder. “Let’s see. Ah, you’re going to Mullen in Nebraska. Hooker
County
.” She chuckled. “Had me a tad worried there, Eva. Don’t want to go telling people you’re heading for a hooker’s district. In English, hooker’s a word for prostitute.
Prostituée, en français.
And that’s surely not you, is it, shug?”

Eva’s cheeks flushed. Hope’s eyes seemed to bore into her heart. Seeing what she’d done. What she was. She wanted to run away. But then Hope was squeezing her hand, smiling at her, saying, “’Course you aren’t, Sugar. Now you just set yourself down and forget them tough ol’ times. Hear? You look ahead to your bright future, Eva. To your new life!”

Eva, Marie, and the others spent the next hour finishing paperwork. In the late afternoon, the Army bussed the women to a large, gray hotel where they were put up, four to a room. They had dinner in the dining room together. There were French girls, Belgians, some Dutch, and three Danes. That was one noisy meal.

The next day Eva and the rest of her group got an introduction to life in the USA. Hope showed a US Army featurette,
Welcome To America
, starring Robert Mitchum as Joe, a newly-discharged GI, and Susan Hayward as FiFi, his French war bride. The viewers go with FiFi as she takes the family Olds convertible to shop for typical household products like Ivory laundry soap, Oscar-Mayer frankfurters, Skippy peanut butter, Coca-Cola, Crisco, Hershey’s chocolate bars, and Lucky Strike cigarettes. Then they see her roast a turkey and bake pumpkin pie for Joe’s Thanksgiving feast. After the film, Hope shoehorned American history and geography into an hour, spent a half-hour on traditions, and ten minutes on idiomatic English. Finally, a sergeant from the Bronx covered typical male interests. Explaining baseball in minute detail and minced French, he might as well have been explicating Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Mandarin.

Early the next morning a convoy of eleven olive-drab GI buses and five smoky deuce-and-a-half trucks took the war brides to Le Havre. They were aboard the Pocahontas by noon and were sailing by mid-afternoon.

The SS Pocahontas was an Italian steamship liner, originally the
Trovatore
and now renamed by the US Merchant Marine.
Trovatore
had spent her cruising days between the wars plying the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. Her eighty-nine staterooms easily accommodated Hope, Nurse Bleck, Eva, and the other 224 women. Serving under an American captain, the crew was Italian. Delfino, the chef from Cornali, had the passengers drooling over his gravies. Goffredo, the second mate from Brindisi, had them sighing over his looks. And Fiorello, the red-haired Milanese meal steward, had them
ah-ing
as he sang Puccini arias between courses.

The Pocahontas was small by trans-Atlantic liner standards, and it would have been rough on passengers had the seas not been especially calm that August. The brides spent their days talking about the past and the future—in American English when Hope was around. That and sunbathing. Lots of sunbathing.

Eva spent afternoons in a blue and white-striped deck chair, reading the copy of
My Antonia
Stan gave her. She’d started the book to help her with English, but she stuck with it for Antonia, the spunky girl who fled the Old World to make a new life on the American plains.

It was foggy on the morning of August 23. At 11:40 an announcement came over the ship’s PA system. “All passengers please report to the foredeck immediately.” As the women trooped forward, they muttered grumbles about another emergency drill.

Hope was waiting for them, standing a few paces from the bow. In one hand she had a bright red scarf, dancing wildly in the stiff headwind. With the other she held a red, white and blue megaphone to her mouth. “Ladies, please direct y’all’s peepers into the haze straight along the direction we’re heading. Shortly they gonna see themselves something. I have in my hand five silver dollars for the hawk-eye who first spots and identifies that something.”

The women peered into the fog. Murmurs swirled through the
mesdames
like the misty breeze, until suddenly a squeal from one silenced the rest. “
Voilà, la Statue de la Liberté!
”

Everyone looked in the direction Lucie, the farm girl from Brittany, was pointing.

“English please, Lucie,” said Hope.

The girl’s cheeks, soft and plump as overripe plums, flushed. “She is Liberty’s statue.”

All eyes strained forward, and like corn in a popper, there was a rolling explosion of excited sightings. Lady Liberty materialized from the fog, faded briefly, then reemerged, confident and commanding. As if the summer sun had finished napping, haze that moments before seemed impenetrable vanished like a magician’s rabbit. The harbor teemed with vessels of every sort, and the forest of buildings that was New York strove to bridge earth and heaven. Statue, water, city: For Eva it was drama and hope. It was her new start.

A New Forest

Eva stood in the warm sun at the Pocahontas’ railing, watching the first war brides, the pregnant ones, toddle down the gangway to a large, green tent on the pier. Over the entrance was a big white banner—
USA Immigration. Welcome!
As the first women disembarked, a Victrola fitted with a loudspeaker struck-up the wedding march,
Here Comes the Bride
.

The pregnant brides disappeared into the tent, and a crane hoisted a huge net filled with luggage down to pier where stevedores loaded the cases onto a string of carts. When the carts were full, a tractor pulled them to the line of ten bright orange school buses idling on the far side of the tent as the Victrola played Glenn Miller’s
In the Mood
.

The pier, the harbor, even the sky above, bustled with activity. The scene, so purposeful, so enthusiastic, so American, fascinated Eva. It pleased her to feel a part of that. With the Victrola belting out the Andrews Sisters’ harmony on
Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,
Eva daydreamed faces onto the cottony clouds until Hope called her group’s number.

Clutching her paperwork folder, Eva walked down the swaying gangway behind Impala, a girl who’d grown up in French colonial Africa. Impala was heavy enough to make her name conspicuously inappropriate. Inside the tent, the heat was staggering. The first line, waiting for the preliminary Immigration Service interview, was long and slow-moving. The two large fans hurling hot, humid air didn’t help much.

After five minutes in the line, the girl in front of Impala whirled around and slapped her, shouting, “Stop pushing, you fat cow.” Impala’s sweat-soaked body reeled back on Eva.

Nurse Bleck rushed over. “Keep up that scrapping and you’ll go to the end of the line.” She flounced her skirt to cool her legs. “Ladies, please! I know it’s hot in here, but stay calm and you’ll get through quicker.”

Eva wiped Impala’s sweat from her hands. Fanning herself with her paperwork, she could feel her own perspiration trickling down her back.

Finally she was at the front of the line, standing before the Immigration Service clerk, a bored-looking woman with a large, flat nose and a prominent gold front tooth. She sat at a desk with a table fan blowing directly in her face. She took Eva’s papers without a word and began filling in information in a ledger book. Halfway through, she put her pen down, shook her hand, and massaged the knuckle joints. “Damn rheumatiz,” she grunted.

Eva looked on in silence.

The clerk finished her notations and flipped pages to a checklist. “Have you been convicted of or incarcerated for a crime?”

“No,” Eva said.

The clerk checked the
No
box. “Have you ever been a Communist Party member?”

Eva watched the clerk check the
No
box before she could say, “No.”

“Ever been a member of either the Nazi or Fascist Parties?” She checked the
No
box.

“No,” Eva said.

“Been an agent of a country other than the United States?” She went down the list checking
No
for the next five questions.

Eva reached into her dress pocket and crossed her fingers. “No.”

The clerk went directly to the last question. “Did you answer the above nine questions truthfully?” This time she checked
Yes
. “Sign and Date.”

Eva looked to the left and right. “Yes, I did.” She signed the paper.

The clerk shoved the file into Eva’s hands. “Proceed to station two.” She looked around her. “Next”

At station two Eva signed more documents. She moved to station three where a stiff nurse in a starched white uniform took her health history. The nurse escorted Eva behind a screen and conducted a brief physical exam before sending her on.

At the last station a slender man with a pencil line moustache did the final review. He made a show of signing and stamping the documents. “Welcome to America,” he intoned and escorted Eva to the tent’s exit.

Outside the air felt cool and breezy. A smiling woman in a frilly pink chiffon dress and high heels glanced at Eva’s file and said, “I’m Lillian, from Mayor LaGuardia’s office. You’re in bus number nine, honey. I’ll show you there.” She took Eva by the arm to the bus where another stylish woman took her to a seat and handed her a blue paper gift bag.

After she’d opened the window, Eva looked in her bag. It contained a small American flag, a pewter Empire State Building lapel pin courtesy of Macy’s, a cosmetics kit from Gimbels, a toothbrush with
A. Levin, DDS
inscribed on the handle, two melted Hershey bars, a pack of Beechnut gum, a box of Crackerjacks, a bagel, an apple, and copies of
Better Homes and Gardens
and
Life
magazines. The
Life
made an excellent fan.

When all had cleared Immigration, the buses pulled out, moving bumper-to-bumper like a giant segmented worm. Soon the worm broke in two, four buses going to Grand Central Station with Nurse Bleck, and six, including Eva’s, heading to Pennsylvania Station. Moving through Manhattan, Eva put her head out the bus window trying to see the skyscrapers’ tops.