Under the Same Blue Sky (4 page)

But Pittsburgh was strangling me. Only wandering in Carnegie Institute, studying the lines and shadings of the masters, gave a little calm—until a battle scene reminded me that Mr. Carnegie’s companies grew fatter with war contracts. I stopped going to picture shows, for each began with newsreels of Allied soldiers kissing mothers and sweethearts good-bye, battlefield heroics, or maps of Europe jigsaw-cut with new front lines. My school friends were German, English, Russian, Italian, Greek, and Polish. Each week brought word from “over there” of men dead, maimed, shell-shocked, taken prisoner, or missing, homes destroyed, and towns blasted away. Like my father, I began picturing East Ohio Street lined with corpses. Life before the war was a pretty fairy tale. Who could see peace through the gritty dust that burned our eyes?

T
HOSE WHO HAD
predicted peace by Christmas were wrong. The killing had no end. Thousands on thousands died in battles that moved front lines a few yards or not at all. Who were
my
allies now, when
Americans praised Britain’s blockade of Germany? Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, admitted blandly that the blockade’s goal was to starve both soldiers and civilians, that one must not be squeamish in combating evil. “The hideous policy of indiscriminate brutality has placed the German race outside of the pale. The only way to restore peace in the world and shatter the brutal menace is to carry the war throughout the length and breadth of Germany.”

Uncle Willy read these words in the
Post
and slammed the paper on our table, thundering: “Russians slaughtered their way across Prussia. The British crucified a German prisoner; Belgians gouged out eyes, strung up our men on trees, and set bodies on fire. Isn’t
that
‘indiscriminate brutality’?”

“Willy, please,” my mother said quietly, “the neighbors.” Yes, we had begun to live like secret traitors, careful not to speak publicly about the war lest someone suspect us of “helping the Kaiser,” to keep silent as our people starved and died.

After winter retreated to a bearable chill, neighborhood boys came out again to play. Now the games were laced with name-calling, spiked with vengeance for their families’ losses. They came filled with talk of the Kaiser’s blood-mad Huns, vicious English drinking tea after killing babies, merciless French and Italians, and barbarous Russians, worse than Cossacks. The boys’ grim faces frightened me. With a plate of my mother’s
butterplätzchen,
I lured them from trenches on a Saturday afternoon.

“Listen,” I began as they munched cookies. “If you
must
play war, why not one from the history books?” One that’s long over, I meant, with deaths they needn’t revenge. “How about the American Revolution?”

“We don’t have red coats,” Artie complained.

“Do you really need them?”

“My ma has red ribbons,” Peter offered.

“If she has brown ones, they can be for Americans,” Davy said.

“Wonderful! And since they didn’t use trenches back then, maybe you could—”

“Fill them in!” the boys announced, thrilled with the new enterprise.

The de-trenching and construction of costumes took days. For what was grandly termed the “inauguration,” I was brought to see Davy play Patrick Henry, perched on a rock with a three-corner cardboard hat. “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace,” he declaimed, “but there is no peace.” The shrill voice rose: “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” The boys cheered. The speech was such a success that others made it, then a King George responded. I suggested Paul Revere’s Ride, the Boston Tea Party, Washington crossing the Delaware, Swamp Fox eluding the Redcoats, and Nathan Hale’s heroic last words: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Squatting on a filled-in trench, the boys spent hours in loud but peaceful planning. I brought history books and helped them search out other stories: freezing camps at Valley Forge, Lafayette training the troops, Cornwallis surrendering at Yorktown. “They aren’t angry anymore,” I bragged in my pedagogy class. “They’re just playing.” I began believing my mother: I
would
be extraordinary in my field.

Then the American Revolution ended. Coming home one afternoon in late April, I found the boys filthy and exhausted between remade trenches. With difficulty, I coaxed them to the sidewalk for a game of marbles from the time we simply called “before.” They played awhile to please me, but then Davy sat back on his heels and announced: “Hazel, the problem is, marbles just aren’t
fun
anymore.”

Why had I been so confident? Fortunately, dense storm clouds were rolling over the daily gray. “It’s going to rain,” I said. “You better
get home. Your mothers don’t like muddy shoes.” With this much in common, they scampered away. For a week, rain kept the boys inside as their trenches filled with filthy water. I’d never been so grateful for rain, as if Nature worked to my purposes.

T
HAT MONTH
, H
ELEN
Keller came to town. My entire normal school class went to hear the toneless, mechanical voice interpreted by her great teacher and companion, Anne Sullivan. Miss Keller described her childhood, blind and deaf, and how she had been released from darkness by the light of learning. The audience cheered wildly but turned grimly silent when Miss Keller spoke of public matters: “War is the particular business of a few men.” I leaned forward, now understanding her perfectly. “Some of the ablest press agents of the world are hired to promote preparedness. But peace is everybody’s business, and no one attends to it.”

“What the heck does Helen Keller know about anybody’s business? She’s blind and deaf, for God’s sake,” someone said in the lobby.

I
would attend to peace.
I
would teach the merits of peace to country schoolchildren.
My
students would not play war games. Perhaps peace could even come to East Ohio Street. But as my father could have told me, these hopes were simple and sanguine. The rains ceased and warm days dried the empty lot. A few boys now worked as messengers in munitions plants, but Davy and Artie commandeered the others to find abandoned baby carriages they would transform into armored tanks.

May 17 brought new disaster. The RMS
Lusitania,
a British passenger ship with 128 Americans on board, was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank. The German embassy was unrepentant: the
Lusitania
was carrying more than four thousand cases of ammunition destined for the Allies. Clear warnings had been placed in New York papers that she’d be a legitimate target.

Anxious clumps of German-Americans in shops and homes argued in whispers that the loss of life was regrettable but justified. Far more than 128 of
our
women and children had starved to death from the British blockade. But American newspapers exploded against the Huns, the barbarous killer of innocent civilians. In this web of fury and accusation, where was justice, reason, or sanity? I said nothing about the war in class and stopped reading newspapers on streetcars, afraid the very movements of my eyes would betray me.

“What will they do to us?” my mother fretted.

“Nothing,” my father soothed. “We’ve lived here for years. People know us. That’s the important thing.” It’s true that the boys of the
Volksblatt
incident had apologized. Their families owed money at our store. “I know you’ll pay me when you can,” my father always said. They’d remembered this. My mother’s ministrations were equally known: blankets and warm bread for a family burned out of their home at night, money collected for a crippled steelworker, healing soups for the sick, and cakes donated for charity bake sales. Besides, my father argued, President Wilson knew very well that the
Lusitania
was armed.
He
didn’t want war, and Congress knew all the advantages of neutrality.

But the boys weren’t neutral. The next Sunday, after church services and masses, they poured back to the empty lot. I heard them fighting about the
Lusitania
and hurried over. “You killed civilians!” Davy was shrieking at Herman. “My father said so.”

“She was a warship!” Herman screamed back. “Every passenger knew that.”

“We’ll get you for Tannenberg,” Peter said. “My uncle was saving his friend, and you Krauts killed him.”

The small, contorted faces were hardly recognizable. “Boys! Boys!” I pleaded. “You’re not enemies.” How does one instant become an
eternity? How are the particulars of space and gesture recalled with such horrible clarity? Even today, I can draw Davy, Peter, Artie, Herman, Max, Lars, and all the others in their places. I see Davy pick up a rock. His knuckles clench. I hear my scream as the rock leaves his hand. It turns in the air. I’m running, holding up my own hand as if to pluck it down before it drives into Herman’s eye. Red erupts.

I send Artie, the fastest runner, to Dr. Edson’s office. The other boys stand stricken. I’m holding Herman, my hand over the streaming eye, repeating: “The doctor’s coming, the doctor’s coming.” I want to scream to all of Pittsburgh:
Stop the factories! Stop the newspapers! Take us back to “before”!

Dr. Edson arrives, gasping: “I called an ambulance.” He covers the eye with gauze.

“Will he live?” Davy whispers. Dr. Edson nods. “And his eye?” No answer.

Herman lost the eye. It was a miracle, everyone said, that the damage wasn’t worse. Davy ceased eating, so stricken and comfortless that his family moved to a different neighborhood, more “American,” and not so “mixed.”

My father, Uncle Willy, and Mr. Schmidt filled in the trenches while Mr. Hess and I rigged a fence around the lot. Older boys stopped to watch. “This wouldn’t have happened to the kid if Germany hadn’t started the war.”

“It wasn’t Germany,” Uncle Willy said quietly. “A Serb shot the archduke.”

“Serbs, Krauts, same thing.”

CHAPTER 3

Shell Shock

I
n the days after Herman lost his eye, I feared I was losing myself. To have held a child and been so helpless was an agony. Suppose I’d left our flat earlier or run faster? Suppose I’d found better ways to move the boys back to marbles and stickball? Suppose I wasn’t meant to be a teacher? “Suppose the war hadn’t started?” my friend Luisa countered. “Hazel, you can’t control everything. The good thing is, nobody’s using the lot anymore, and the boys
are
playing stickball now. They could get hurt at stickball. Would
that
be your fault?”

No, I admitted, I couldn’t avert every tragedy, but I was realizing that doing the business of peace, even among children, was far more difficult than I’d imagined. Here in a city where so many nationalities chafed together, where so many families’ food was paid by munitions contracts, and the air itself was thick with the throb of war work, what teacher could work the miracle I intended?

But surely far from Pittsburgh, under placid blue skies, Europe’s troubles would feel far away. “Let’s
all
move,” I urged my parents. “There must be many towns that need hardware stores.” Blank stares answered me. This was home, the trench they’d defend. I loved them,
but more and more I was becoming a foreigner on East Ohio Street. My dreams perplexed them, and the habits that brought them comfort made me restless.

The rains returned, thick streaming walls of gray, until the sidewalks ran with mud and ash, a filthy mix my mother would not allow in the house or even on the steps to our flat. It was Friday. I’d just heard that the small town of Galway, two hours south of Pittsburgh, might need a teacher for their one-room school. I took off my wet shoes at the base of the stairway and started up in stocking feet, thinking of Galway.

Walking softly, I heard my mother and Tante Elise speaking of me. “I’m worried about her,” my mother was saying. “She thinks everything will be different somewhere else. My sister Margit was the same at her age. She couldn’t stand Heidelberg.”

“But Hazel doesn’t even remember your sister. She thinks you and Johannes are—”

“Yes,” my mother said sharply. “But suppose this restlessness is in the blood? Margit was
sure
she’d be happy in New Jersey, but she wasn’t. Then, no, having a baby,
that
would make her happy, and then no, living in New York City without her baby, but she wasn’t happy there, either.”

“It doesn’t matter what Margit did or what was in her blood. You and Johannes raised Hazel.”

I gripped the banister.
Raised Hazel.
Not birthed me? Rain pounded outside, washing away my world. The step beneath my feet sagged. Margit Brandt, that flitting name in family stories, the shadowy figure who died young in New York,
that
woman was my mother? Were the men in scarlet jackets true but the man in a faded work apron, his face as familiar as my own,
that
man was not my father? The voice behind the door was not my mother’s? Was I myself not Hazel, then, but someone else?

“Margit never fit in Heidelberg and Hazel doesn’t seem to fit in Pittsburgh either. She’s always drawing, always dreaming,” my mother was saying. “She— What’s that sound?” Had she heard my thumping heart?

“Nothing. But, Katarina, this is your very best
kirschenplotzer
. Could I have more?” As talk turned to cherry cake, I made my way downstairs, put on my shoes, and walked on wooden legs to our store, shell-shocked. After the loss of a certainty I’d never thought to doubt: that I was Hazel Renner, born in Heidelberg to Johannes and Katarina. So I’d been lied to, lovingly, but lied to. The ground shook beneath me, as if battered by bombs. And in the future, what else that I fervently, fondly thought was true, told by those who claimed to love me, might be revealed as false?

In the store, a tall man known to all as Johannes Renner, was listening intently to Mr. Goldstein speaking Yiddish and answering him in German as they puzzled out malfunctions in a stove. When Mr. Goldstein left, I opened my mouth, closed it, and finally tried again: “I was on the stairs. Mother and Tante Elise were talking about Margit’s baby.” The store clock boomed. A mouse scrabbled behind a wall. “She didn’t keep the baby, did she? Was it me?”