Under the Same Blue Sky (29 page)

But not even Jud had time for baseball now. Headlines trumpeted Allied victories on every front, but Western Union kept receiving death notices. On a rainy spring day, I saw Walter for the first time in weeks, riding down Main Street in uniform and ignoring my greeting. Alma happened by, long pigtails bobbing as she skipped between puddles. I asked her how Walter was doing in school.

“Not so good. He brought the telegram to Billy’s house. Now nobody talks to him even if it’s not his fault the Huns got Billy’s daddy.”

“But Jud’s a Western Union boy. Do his friends still talk to him?”

“Yeah they do, but I have to go.” The long pigtails swung away. I followed Walter’s path. It was easy in a small town. His first deliveries were innocuous. He slipped in and out of stores, usually pocketing a tip. Then he turned into a neat yard, passing Gloria, who stopped her game of jacks and followed him, stiff-legged. The front door swallowed them both. A woman inside screamed: “Go away! Get out of here!” Walter ran out to the curb and bent over, vomiting. I reached him and held the shaking shoulders.

“I can’t do this,” he sobbed. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

“No, Walter, you can’t. It’s not fair to ask a child. I’ll do something.”

“But my father says I have to keep this job.”

“Then we’ll change the job. Come, I’ll deliver the rest with you.” Fortunately there were no more death notices that afternoon. When we parted on Oak Street, he turned to me with hopeful trust, like seekers at my blue house. “Thank you, Miss Renner. I know you’ll fix this.” How? By ending the war or stopping Dogwood men from dying? By magically causing survivors to receive these telegrams placidly?

Back at the castle, I explained my predicament. “Be careful what you promise,” was the baron’s advice. He wouldn’t consider secretly matching Walter’s salary. “Obviously his parents would suspect me. Please, Hazel, be reasonable.” It was my mother who suggested I take my problem to Pastor Birke.

“To talk about it?”

“Of course not. To fix it.” Dubious, I went to his office and found him surrounded by piles of clutter, a surprising contrast to his studied public matter.

“I’m a bachelor,” he explained, “and sometimes I just can’t organize—but sit down, Hazel. Here, let me clear you a space.” He moved stacks of journals from two chairs, sat by me, and listened to my story of Walter and Jud. “And Katarina thought I could solve this problem?”

“Yes. She sent me here.”

His eye strayed to a map of Europe on his wall—apparently pastors had them, too. “So this is what we do,” he said. “Men my age create wars. Young men fight and die in them. Then we send out
children
with the news. It’s a sin, Hazel. Let me think.” We sat in silence. “Yes, this could work. Charlie Snead runs the Western Union office. He’s a
parishioner. I think we can keep children from doing this work in Dogwood.” He stood, hunted for his hat, and led me to the office door. “Give my respects to your mother. Her cinnamon rolls are from heaven. Truly.”

That Sunday Pastor Birke took me aside to say that he and Charlie Snead had contacted Dogwood’s two other pastors, the priest, and the rabbi. All had agreed to help. Starting immediately, when a death notice came in, Charlie would have one of them bring it to the family. If no clergyman was available, Charlie would go himself. Jud and Walter would continue delivering routine telegrams.

“You can be proud of your part in this,” the baron said warmly. And I was proud. It was a small thing, but wholly good. Pastor Birke also began giving the names and addresses of the grieving families to Mrs. McClellan, who had my mother bring a loaf of fresh bread and cinnamon buns to each home. Often I went with her. “In the midst of sorrow,” she’d say, “the salt and the sweetness of life remain. One must eat.”

L
ATE IN THE
summer of 1918, I came upon the baron studying his map of Europe. Like my father’s, it was a lace of pinpricks. Blue pins showed the Allied advance, constantly pushing back red pins of the Central Powers. “The Hindenburg Line is breaking,” he said. “We’re losing the Balkans. Germany our mother, America our wife. What happens when the wife is strangling the mother?” He walked to the window, turned crisply, and came back. “When Germany’s utterly defeated, how will my mother survive?” I took the question as rhetorical. German’s postwar troubles were beyond me. More insistent: “Hazel,
how
will she survive?”

“You mean—”

“
My
mother, the Baroness von Richthofen. My brother and father left massive debts. The Poles will take Prussia back. Then what? Even in peacetime, my mother was like a child. She’s never been in a bank. She couldn’t manage an estate, even if she’s allowed to keep it. Which is impossible. When the war’s over, vandals will come. Tenants, townspeople, and soldiers will strip Mein Königsberg. Perhaps they’ll burn it. Who knows what they’ll do to her. They hated my father.” He turned to me, wanting help. This was as strange and nearly as frightening as when he judged my first offering letter.

“She let your father send you away. But she’s an old woman now and helpless. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Yes. For years, I hated her weakness. Yet, as you say, she’s an old woman now and helpless.” He turned his bezel ring.

“She could live here.”

“
Here?
” Startled, he turned to the office door, as if imagining the baroness coming in.

“Isn’t this like her home in Prussia?”

The question clearly made him uncomfortable. “Yes, somewhat.” He wrote a line on notepaper, perhaps an option: The baroness comes here. Then he crossed it out with a neat stroke. “Impossible. She was always terrified of water. Even crossing bridges made her panic.”

“I see. Is there someone in Germany she could live with?”

“A sister in Berlin.” He wrote another line. Considered it. “Aunt Elka always needed money. Discreet monthly payments could be arranged, which might make her more hospitable. I have an agent in Berlin.”

“Would the baroness be happy there?”

“They always fought. Aunt Elka hated my father and said my mother was a fool to marry him.”

“Well then.”

“Yes, well then.” He crossed out the “Aunt Elka” line. For moving delicate art through war zones, the baron was an endless font of alternative methods, agents, and routes. This project defeated him. He put the fine pen in its holder. The square shoulders slumped.

“After the war, you could go over yourself and bring her back,” I suggested. “The baroness might be less frightened if she’s with you.” He didn’t lift the pen to write: “Go to Prussia.”

“The Allies will be everywhere. As soon as I open my mouth, I’ll be another enemy. Why would they let me through?”

“Can you leave her in Prussia?” The question hung in the air for so long that it took physical shape between us. When he lifted his pen, it seemed weighted. He set it down.

“No, I can’t leave her there. She’s an old woman now and helpless.”

“Well then.”

And for me, Hazel:
Well then?
Didn’t I owe him help, now that he, too, was helpless? If I went, I’d be an American in an Allied zone and a buffer in the surely tense rapport with his mother. I could be useful, perhaps essential. Yes, there might be danger, but millions of men had faced far worse. Tom had faced worse. Here in Dogwood, I was only waiting for Tom. In Prussia after the war, I might find news of him or at least be close to where he might be, or where he might have ceased to be. “I can go with you, Baron. I can be your ally.”

He looked at me as he rarely did, head to toe. “In Prussia?”

“Yes.”

A slow, wry smile crossed the beautiful face. “We could pretend to be a couple.”

“Yes, that might help.”

“We could even pretend for my mother.”

“We could.”

He crossed the space between our desks and extended a hand to mine, bending crisply at the waist. “When the war ends, we’ll go. And I thank you, Hazel.”

“When the war ends.” And so I began a new stage of
when. When
the war ended, I’d go to Prussia with the baron.
When
Tom was found, joy would begin.
When
he was known to be lost forever, I’d begin imagining my life alone.

CHAPTER 18

Crossing Back

T
hrough the summer of 1918, Allied forces pushed deeper into German territory. The Hindenburg Line wavered and cracked. German sailors revolted. Soldiers mutinied and deserted, first a trickle, soon a steady flow. Yet when Kaiser Wilhelm II was informed that his military situation was hopeless, he refused to abdicate. The generals kept fighting. Bombs still pounded the wasted land, mustard gas poured into trenches, and men were thrown against machine-gun fire all along the Western Front. Everywhere civilians starved. We waited for the end, as when a dying man struggles on until the anguished family’s hearts cry out:
Let it go, stop fighting, there’s nothing left to win.

In Dogwood, the terrible telegrams kept coming. People drew their curtains when clergymen appeared on their street:
Go to another house. Keep walking. Keep driving. Go away.
Would a somber man in black come to our gate with a new telegram regretting to inform me that Thomas Alan Jamison, formerly missing in action, was now confirmed dead? I whipped between fear and hope. Without news of his death, Tom might still be alive. But each day that he was lost, unidentified in a field
hospital or imprisoned by a starving enemy surely brought him closer to death.

“Any news?” Lena asked when I saw her in town.

“No.”

“I’m sorry.” She spared me “No news is good news.” A year of war had made us all more honest.

When I told my mother we’d be going to Prussia as soon as an armistice was signed, she was horrified. “Don’t. Hazel, please don’t.”

“I have to.” We’d be back in a month, I assured her. If there was news of Tom while we were gone, Anna would notify the baron’s agent in London.

“But it will be dangerous. And the baroness might not even be alive when you get there.”

“Mother, I have to go. I have to help him.” She and I spent more time together. As I’d done with Tom, I made the most of our
now.

My vague plans for Paris after the war had turned murky. If I still meant to go, the baron advised, better to wait until the city settled, a year, or six months at least. But Tom might look for me there. I wavered daily. After Prussia, where should I wait for him? And how long should I wait? Every “after” was unknowable.

I wasn’t alone. “After the war . . . After our boys come home,” was the only talk in town. Even when “our boys” came home, would they be the same as those who marched gaily away? Would arms or legs be missing? Would they wobble and twitch from shell shock, scream and hide at loud noises, or seem to see, like endless nickelodeon loops, enormous rats eating the bellies of their comrades?

Even my mother struggled with her “after.” Rationing had cut bakery supplies; there were fewer weddings and parties. Sales dropped steeply; debts mounted. Mrs. McClellan spoke of closing the shop. After so much death, would people ever be happy and wanting sweets?

Meanwhile, in the tower office, we worked frantically. By circuitous routes, the baron let his mother know that he was coming and that she must pack a few necessities for the voyage, which he had his agent assure her would be “mostly by land.” We sent out inquiries to potential buyers of certain family treasures, “assuming they weren’t sold to pay off my brother’s debts,” the baron noted grimly.

Grumbling loudly about our folly, Anna began listing supplies we must bring to “the wasteland” we’d find in Prussia. She packed tea, chocolate, soap, hard biscuits, dried fruit and meats, jams, and sauerkraut. “These things never go bad,” she argued when the baron reminded her that we’d be traveling light. “Do you think you’ll find stores over there? Believe me, some people will give their shirts for sauerkraut.”

“We’ll take it all,” I interceded. “Thank you, Anna.” Beneath her fussing was pure panic. I overheard her and my mother reeling out the dangers of land mines, bandits, demobilized soldiers spoiling for revenge, starving and desperate civilians with nothing to lose, poisoned wells, ruined farms, and nowhere any food. Most of all they feared the baron couldn’t protect me. A fresh-faced young woman, unspoiled by war, I’d be any man’s prize.

“He’ll take his pistol,” Anna reminded my mother.

“And use it against his own people? They won’t even be
people
anymore. They’ll be animals.”

This kitchen talk, Kurt’s dour “Are you sure this trip is wise?” and the Hendersons’ warnings of perilous ocean crossing filled me with anxious dread. But I couldn’t retreat now. At least I wouldn’t be trapped in trenches or foxholes, bombed or gassed. Nobody would force me “over the top” into barbed wire and machine-gun fire. By the simple fact of my sex, I’d been spared death, maiming, shell shock, and the ceaseless sight of maimed bodies. Why
shouldn’t
I confront the world that was Tom’s? No, I must go forward like any good soldier.

Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on November 9, 1918. Two days later, on November 11, Anna, Kurt, Tilda, my mother, and I joined a raucous crowd on Main Street to hear the glorious news. An armistice had been signed at 11:11 a.m. in a railway car in France. Church bells ran. The firehouse whistle blew. Car horns blared. The Hendersons gave out scores of toy horns; children blasted them up and down the street, chased by wildly barking dogs. My mother and Mrs. McClellan passed trays of “victory cookies” made from the last of their sugar reserves. I caught a glimpse of Pastor Birke helping with the trays.

Those who had hissed and whispered “Hun” behind our backs now included us in rounds of kisses, hugs, and giddy congratulations. Still, some asked: “Where’s the Baron von Richthofen? Couldn’t show his face today?” When I didn’t answer, they drifted off.

Coming upon Walter and his parents in the swirling crowd, I risked: “Your son has a great talent for art. I hope you can encourage it.”

In the flow of good feeling, they both nearly smiled. “Well, perhaps. Now that the war is over.”