My Own Two Feet (22 page)

Authors: Beverly Cleary

BOOK: My Own Two Feet

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Men sometimes asked what prices were like “on the outside,” as if the army were a prison. I telephoned Montgomery Ward and asked for a
catalog, which we kept in the library. Someone was always studying it, and some men compiled lists from it as they dreamed of the future when they could return home.

And then there was the first lieutenant in the Engineering Corps. I shall call him Jimmy. Once Jimmy asked if we could think of a holiday that he could use as an excuse for sending his wife a gift. We consulted reference books and found that grouse-shooting season was about to open in Scotland. “Great,” Jimmy said with a grin, and left, presumably to send his wife a gift appropriate for grouse shooting. Jimmy was full of fun. We made a game of quoting poetry to see if the other could identify it. I wondered if he had been required to memorize as much poetry in high school as I had. One day Jimmy said he was bored. Wasn't there some work he could do in the library? There was. To our surprise Jimmy shelved books, not only that day, but every day.

Several enlisted men said, when Jimmy was not around, “I don't get it. A first lieutenant shelving books.” We didn't get it either; we were just thankful. We wondered what he was being treated for, but of course we could not ask. Then one day Jimmy did not appear. As we shelved books ourselves, we missed his help and his good humor. When Colonel Dale came in, I remarked
that we missed Jimmy. The colonel said the entire hospital staff had been amused because the librarians were the only people in the hospital who could do anything with Jimmy. I was astonished, unaware we had been doing anything with him. The colonel explained that Jimmy had been held prisoner in the hospital because there wasn't much he hadn't done, from attempted rape to cashing bad checks. His wife had not heard from him for months. He had been given a dishonorable discharge and sent on his way. The next day he telephoned Colonel Dale to say he was broke and had no way of getting home to the East Coast. The colonel told him to start walking.

Most doctors, I soon learned, read history, biography, and mysteries. Men who broke their legs riding motorcycles always wanted Western stories. The psychiatrist requested books by Arthur Koestler. A man who said in civilian life he “sold jewels to rich old women” shared my pleasure in James Thurber. After the war I saw him doing just that, selling jewels to rich old women in I. Magnin. Enlisted men often asked for books by Donald Henderson Clark, an author I had never heard of. The 9th Service Command's library philosophy was “Give the men what they want.” I ordered
The Impatient Virgin, Tawny
, and other
Clark titles, which the men pounced on, usually saying, “I didn't think you would have
these
.”

Best-sellers were in demand, most of all
Forever Amber
, by Kathleen Winsor. When I saw the author's picture on the book jacket, I recognized a Cal student with whom I had shared Professor Lehman's course in The Novel and who had surprised the student body by marrying the captain of the football team. That book, written by a classmate, was a nagging reminder every time it crossed our new circulation desk that I, too, wanted to writeâif the war would ever end, and I could find time.

That was one question I did ask Colonel Dale: “When is this war going to end?”

He answered, “The same time all wars end. When people get tired.” It seemed to me everyone was tired. Men asked for the prophecies of Nostradamus to search for clues to the end of the war. There was no longer any need to look at pins on the maps posted in the hospital lobby. I could tell how the war was going by the faces of the men. Clarence's draft number was coming closer. He was called to the Berkeley High School gym for what enlisted men called “short-arm inspection.” The navy had him deferred, and I dreaded long franked envelopes in the mailbox. Would they contain a draft notice or another
deferment? Mother, whose letters grew more depressed, wrote asking if it wasn't time for Clarence to go. Judy's brother was killed in a naval battle. His C.O. wrote the family, “Nathan was a fine boy.” His name was Aaron.

If Colonel Dale's prediction was correct, the war could not go on much longer. Although Clarence and I had no time for recreation, we were glad to turn our living room couch into a bed for transient relatives. Atlee, now a trim and handsome navy flier too tall for our couch, slept on it anyway. He could not tell us at the time, but we learned years later that his aircraft carrier had been kamikaze'd and was being repaired. His sister, Virginia, also turned up to sleep on our couch. She was married to a young man in the navy who was stationed on Treasure Island.

Then my grandmother died, my dear, gentle grandmother, who taught me to sew when I was five years old. Mother stopped to spend a night or two on our couch on her way to visit Verna, as well as her own oldest brother, who lived in Arizona. Seven years of caring for her mother had aged her. Her spunk was gone. I felt sad for Mother, who, although she had always been strict with me, had also been fun-loving until the circumstances of her life had eroded her sense of fun. The visit was peaceful, but I was careful to
watch every word I said. Mother did not ask how much longer Clarence's civilian status would last.

Then, in 1945, on April 12, which happened to be my birthday, a patient came into the library and said softly, “Excuse me, Mrs. Cleary, but did you know President Roosevelt died?” I didn't. A terrible gloom settled over the hospital. “Now we'll never get out,” the men said. Radios broadcast only classical music. No one played “Cow-cow Boogie.” Ping-Pong balls did not
gnip-gnop
.

Late in the afternoon of that terrible day, a big fat sergeant carrying a bouquet of red roses walked into the library. “Are
you
Beverly Cleary?” he angrily demanded. I confessed. “Jee-zus Christ,” he snarled, and thrust the roses at me. “We thought these were for a patient and just about tore the hospital apart trying to find her.” Clarence had remembered my birthday.

On May 7, Germany surrendered to the Allies, a morale-lifting day in the hospital. The men felt they were closer to going homeâunless they were sent to the Pacific. Patients were discharged more quickly than usual, and their places filled with men with eerie greenish skins, the result of taking Atabrine in the tropics to prevent malaria. Others, who had picked up skin fungus in the jungles, looked like mummies. One man described to me his problems soaking his socks off
his feet, infected with jungle rot. Another, a civilian whose eyesight was failing from starvation on the Bataan death march, told me of the death of his wife and child from dysentery. All this could mean only one thing: Hospitals in the South Pacific were preparing for a major battle.

Then the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Stunned silence fell over the hospital. Colonel Dale came into the library as if nothing unusual had happened and returned his books.

“A whole city wiped out with one bomb,” I said. “I think that is horrifying.”

“No,” answered the colonel calmly. “It will bring about the end of the war and save the lives of thousands of our men.” It still seemed a terrible thing and a long way from the small atom-smashing cyclotron in the shack on the Cal campus that the Commonwealth Fellows had shown with such pride one evening only eight years before.

Japan surrendered. Sirens sounded, whistles blew. Patients whooped, hollered, and threw their toilet paper out the windows. Everyone left the library except the Chief of Medical Services, who calmly selected books as if nothing unusual were going on. When he finally left, I locked the door, went home, and fell into bed as exhausted as if I had been in a battle myself.

Men were quickly discharged except for a few very young newly enlisted men who wanted to read dog stories. Then they, too, disappeared, and the hospital was turned over to the Veterans Administration. I was asked to stay on, but when I went for a tour with the new C.O., watched him scrape the floor with a fifty-cent piece to show how slovenly the army had been in waxing over dirt, and saw him wave his arm around the library I had worked so hard on and say, “We'll get rid of most of this junk,” I felt as if I were back with my original hospital C.O. I also knew that I was through with government library service. Later, when I met the librarian who took over for the Veterans Administration, she told me what a pleasure it was to inherit a professionally selected library. Junk, indeed!

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