With Love, Wherever You Are Page 5

  So was his sister. After being stateside almost two years, she still wasn’t back to her fighting weight. She was convinced Boots was alive, and since the Army refused to let her return to the Philippines to look for him, she spent most days on the phone or at the typewriter, trying to get the Army involved.

  Dot had received a Royal Blue Emblem for bravery and other honors from the president, but she never talked about it. She didn’t even tell them about the ceremony until it was too late for any of the family to get to Washington. All she cared about was finding Boots.

  “Dotty finally sent me a photo of her with President Roosevelt and Eleanor at the White House. That ceremony must have been something.”

  “You’re right about that,” Jack said. “She and those other five nurses were the first women to be decorated for bravery in this war—did you know that? You should have seen her face when Eleanor pinned those medals on her.”

  “You were there? She wrote me that nobody from the family was there.”

  Jack twisted his grin. “She didn’t know.”

  “But . . .” Frank let it drop.

  “So, little brother, are you ready for war?”

  There was that question again. Frank had tried to imagine himself in his big brother’s spy shoes, risking his life every day. And Dotty? She’d sacrificed so much. But Frank had no heroic illusions about himself. Two heroes in the family were plenty. “Guess I’m about to find out.”

  Battle Creek, Michigan

  8 April 1944

  Dear Dotty,

  Why didn’t you warn me about boot camp? Was that really live ammo they were shooting over our heads while we crawled in the mud under barbed wire? Anderson and I kept reminding our crazed sergeant that we were doctors, not Marines, but he didn’t get it. I think that sick, sick man enjoyed doing calisthenics before dawn and believed we would as well. Tell me they never made you climb walls with dangling ropes.

  My last week at “camp,” I came in first on the obstacle course, which ended in a 20-mile run. I ran fastest because a 2nd lieutenant swore the ammo was real. Anyway, I got bragging rights over Anderson and Lartz for a while . . . until Sarge pointed out coming in ahead of a pile of doctors was nothing to brag about.

  I think the only reason I got out of there in one piece is that some general issued orders for me to report to Battle Creek, Michigan, two weeks early because Percy Jones Hospital is under the mistaken impression that I’m a disease expert. Apparently we’re woefully short of those fellows. I tried to tell them I’d interned a few weeks in Krueger’s disease lab, but he was the expert, not me. Ever notice how the Army doesn’t listen?

  As head of the rare disease ward, I try to solve mysteries and come up with cures for the few patients on my ward. I guess I’m not that bad at it—it’s like figuring out whodunit in an Agatha Christie mystery. I only have 12 patients right now, but they keep saying I should expect my 150 beds to fill. Hope they’re wrong. I need my rest and playtime. Anderson says there’s a new crop of nurses coming in tomorrow.

  Battle Creek is loads better than El Paso. I know, I know. It’s not like I had to eat pet monkeys. On second thought, have you tasted C-rations? I could swear they’ve got a primate-y flavor. But you’re the expert.

  Dotty, don’t listen to the Army. You’re not a widow just because they list you as one. I think you’d know in your heart if you’d lost Boots.

  Yours truly,

  Frank

  P.S. You’d be proud of me. Tomorrow is Easter, and I’ve talked Anderson and Lartz into going to church with me.

  Somewhere between Chicago and Battle Creek, Michigan

  April 8, 1944

  Dear Eugene,

  No, you cannot call me Lieutenant Gypsy.

  I’m on a train bound for my holding assignment in Battle Creek, Michigan. Ever hear of it? It used to be Battle Creek Sanitarium, run by Dr. Kellogg, the guy who invented flaked cereal and radiation therapy for cancer patients.

  The Army bought the place a couple of years ago and set up the hospital to treat wounded soldiers. They named it Percy Jones, after an Army surgeon who drove ambulances in the last war.

  After basic, they asked each of us what our overseas preference would be. I thought of a million places I’d like to go, but the only choices were Europe or the Pacific. You know I hate the heat. So I asked the guy, “Which place will be hotter?” He looked at me like I had a milk mustache and answered, “The Pacific.” “I pick Europe, then,” said I.

  I’m so excited I can almost understand why you ran off to join the Army. Life feels new. Not at all like Cissna. Since tomorrow is Easter, I should have a chance to look around, eat some cereal, and write you again. I sure wish I could do more than write to you. Do you hate being a soldier? Do you still hear bombs all the time? I can’t imagine you shooting anything except a basketball, Genie.

  Don’t worry about me. How much trouble can one gal get into in the Cereal Capital of the World?

  Love,

  Lt. Gypsy

  BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN

  Helen tried not to gawk like the country girl who still stumbled inside her, but she’d never seen anything like Percy Jones Hospital. Fourteen stories in magnificent stone stretched high above the surrounding land. The base of the hospital complex looked like the entrance to a Grecian palace, with columns supporting the entire face of the building. Those columns, lit up like a fairy-tale castle, had been the first thing she’d seen when she finally caught a car to Battle Creek from the station.

  “Keep up, Nurse,” Captain Walker called over her shoulder. “This isn’t a tour of the countryside.”

  “Sorry.” Helen trotted to catch up with the long-legged Captain Walker. Helen figured the stately nurse was in her forties, single by choice, Army by career. She strutted like a soldier—shoulders back, chin up—and she dressed like a soldier: plain khakis, but a skirt instead of pants. Helen liked the brown-striped seersucker they’d been given at training. It was the only thing she did like about boot camp.

  “I’m sure you’re aware,” Walker was saying, “that the hospital specializes in neurosurgery, plastic surgery for the burn victims of war, and artificial limbs.”

  “At Evanston Hospital, we—”

  “I’m not interested in where you worked or went to school. An Army nurse receives her training from the Army. We were a fifteen-hundred-bed hospital when the war began, but we’re ramping up to receive five times that many patients.”

  “That’s amazing.” Helen felt the sting of rebuke. She hadn’t been trying to show off her education or her experience. In fact, she wanted to warn Captain Walker how little experience she had in their specialties.

  They walked in silence for so long Helen thought she should say something so Walker wouldn’t think she was upset. “Don’t you think the whole place still smells a little like cereal? Or is that my imagination?”

  Walker didn’t bother responding, and Helen wondered if the woman was following an Army script with no room for comment.

  “You’ll have to get into town to buy your uniforms,” Walker said as they passed a group of gals with outfits like hers, minus the bars.

  “I have this uniform already, and it’s pretty swell for most climates.” Helen had a grand total of twenty-six dollars in her savings, and she sure didn’t want to blow it on uniforms, especially if they looked like Captain Walker’s. “Do I really have to buy another one? Not the shoes, surely.” Walker’s shoes were hideous brown things that must have weighed five pounds each. Was that what she’d have to wear? And—insult to injury—pay for herself?

  Without comment, Walker halted at the column entrance to the L-shaped complex. Etched in stone above the columns were the words Percy Jones Army Hospital. Helen got chills reading it. She knew this was just a stopping point for her, a step in her new adventure. During basic, she’d had plenty of regrets about signing up. She’d even wished herself back in Evanston moving rich women’s legs on the side of the bed, instead of moving her own
legs up a muddy hill. Still, the realization that she was now part of this hospital knocked her socks off.

  “This, of course, is where you’ll work. Your ward is the fourth floor.” Captain Walker turned toward a much younger gal who was jogging toward them. She sported the same drab uniform as Walker, and her hair, like Walker’s, barely poked out from under the cap. “What is it, Lieutenant?” Walker demanded.

  The lieutenant muttered something too low for Helen to overhear.

  “Tell them I’ll be right there.” Walker turned back to Helen, and the lieutenant jogged off without so much as an eyelash flicker her way. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go on without me, Nurse Eberhart.” She glanced around, then hollered to a man in soldier khakis, “You! Ward boy!”

  The man came running. “Captain?” Up close, Helen could see his medical arm patch. Tall and lean, he towered over the captain.

  “Show this new nurse to her ward,” Walker commanded. “Fourth, starting today.”

  “Today?” Helen couldn’t keep the panic out of her voice. She hadn’t met her head nurse or duty nurse. She wasn’t sure which wards were on fourth. She hadn’t even unpacked. “It’s Easter,” she said weakly. “I thought . . . I mean, we passed a chapel.”

  Captain Walker frowned. “Do you think the enemy stops fighting because it’s a holiday?”

  “Of course not. But—”

  Walker cut her off. “You’re allowed a thirty-minute break. If you choose to take it at chapel, that’s your choice. But tell the ward boy so he can cover for you. Now, I have to go.” She rushed off before Helen had a chance to ask her any more questions.

  Hopefully the head nurse on four would be more understanding, or at least human.

  “This way, Nurse.” The ward boy led her inside the hospital lobby.

  She stopped at the bottom of the wide staircase and stuck out her hand. A few soldiers and nurses strode around them without paying attention. “I’m Helen Eberhart.”

  He shook her hand. “Bill Chitwood. We better get. I think the nurse you’re replacing took off for Fort Custer.”

  Helen tried to keep up with him as his long legs took the first flight of stairs two at a time. “They must be shorthanded on four, huh?” Maybe that explained why she had to start working on Easter Sunday. In Evanston, it got awfully wild when they worked the floor a nurse short.

  “We’re shorthanded, all right.”

  By the third flight, she’d fallen twenty steps behind. She plodded the rest of the way to the landing, where Chitwood waited, leaning against giant wooden doors.

  Helen struggled to catch her breath. “Say, do you know the duty officer and head nurse on my ward?” She flashed him a smile and whispered, “Are they good eggs?”

  Chitwood broke into a laugh that echoed in the stairwell. “You’d know that one better than me, I reckon. Today, you’re duty officer and head nurse on four.” He swept an arm toward the double doors. “It’s all yours.” Grinning, he took off down the steps.

  All mine? Helen didn’t know whether to laugh at the guy or not. She wished she hadn’t been so mousy around him. He was probably teasing. They wouldn’t make her duty officer, not on her first day. And not head nurse ever, not here.

  Taking a deep breath tinged with ammonia, a familiar hospital smell, and something unfamiliar and rancid, she took hold of the long, metal door handles. With a quick prayer and one swift motion, she yanked open the doors and stepped in.

  It was a long room filled with rows and rows of white-sheeted beds shoved side by side. At first glance, she saw that most of the boys were in traction, an arm or leg bandaged, suspended from planks and ropes, like puppets with nobody to pull the strings.

  Only that wasn’t the worst. Every single patient had parts missing—an arm, a leg, two legs. The nearest bed had a boy who couldn’t have been as old as her youngest brother. Both of his legs were missing, leaving two white stumps rounded at the knees. In the next bed, an armless mummy lay on his pillow, his face wrapped tight, except for one eye peeking out of the darkness.

  It was a room of incomplete bodies, unnatural losses made common by war.

  Helen realized she was still holding the doors open, her arms stiff against the heavy wood. Her head felt light, and her eyes blurred, making the beds spiral like sheets waving from the line on a Cissna Park washday. Without thinking, she backed up, letting the doors slam shut in her face, blocking out the images of those poor, poor boys.

  She turned and ran down the hall with no idea where she was going. When she saw a door marked Men’s, she dashed in. The tiny tiled room—two urinals and a sink—was deserted. Her head swam, and she thought she might faint, although she’d never fainted and wasn’t sure what a faint felt like. She braced herself, stiff-armed above the sink, her body shaking.

  Then came the tears. They pushed up from her chest, burned through her throat, and came out in sobs that racked her body. She gasped for breath, for balance, for anything that would help.

  The door opened. She didn’t care. She kept crying and heard the door close again. Then she looked up at the mirror. She almost didn’t recognize herself, tear-drenched, helpless, and pitiful. When was the last time she’d cried? She hadn’t shed a tear when her mother lay in the garden, bleeding from a ruptured vein. She hadn’t cried when she broke her arm playing basketball with Eugene the summer after eighth grade. Not even when her first true love broke her heart in high school. And she hadn’t cried when her brothers went off to war.

  Tears weren’t going to help now. They certainly wouldn’t do those amputees back there any good. “Helen Marie Eberhart, registered nurse, lieutenant in the United States Army, Gypsy, pull yourself together!”

  She splashed cold water on her face, straightened her uniform, and inspected herself in the mirror. “That’ll have to do.”

  She turned and pulled open the door, just as a tall, dark soldier pushed in.

  “Sorry,” he said, checking the door. He grinned, then tapped the Men’s sign.

  “That’s quite all right,” she managed, as if she were only too glad to share the facilities. “Be my guest.” She strode away fast, hoping he hadn’t gotten a good look at her because if she hadn’t been mistaken, there was a doctor’s insignia on that broad shoulder. All she needed was to have a run-in with a doctor already.

  At the end of the hall, she took a breath, then pulled open the wooden doors.

  “Hey! She’s back!” somebody called. “We didn’t dream her!”

  Helen glanced around the ward and saw three ward boys but no other nurse. Summoning her best and broadest smile, she said, “Well, of course I’m back.” The ward grew quiet, the laughs and murmurs settling to the bottom. She raised her voice, wanting the whole ward to hear her. “I’m Nurse Eberhart, and I’m awfully pleased to meet you!”

  “Well, we’re pleased to meet you!” shouted one patient.

  The ward exploded in wolf whistles, and she laughed. If wolf-whistling from a hospital bed helped these boys feel better, she was all for it. She gazed at them, one by one, not looking away. Their faces were beautiful when they smiled like this, and an inexplicable love took root inside of her, as if they were all her little brothers.

  The whistles were so loud that she didn’t hear the ward doors until they slammed shut. Helen turned to see Captain Walker storm in like a fire-breathing dragon. “Stop that noise this instant!”

  Patients stopped as suddenly as if they’d run out of air at the same time.

  “There will be no more of that behavior in this hospital!” Walker turned her fury on Helen. “What do you think you’re doing, Nurse? Is this what they taught you in that fancy hospital in Evanston? It’s a wonder you ever graduated from Northwestern.”

  So Nurse Walker knew where she’d done her training after all. “No, Captain,” Helen said sweetly. “They didn’t teach us about whistles.”

  A gurgle of laughter flowed through the ward, then stopped when the captain gave them her evil glare. “You are still so
ldiers, and our goal is to make you useful again in the service of your country. You will behave like soldiers.” She raised her finger and shook it, as if scolding children. “And that means no, no, no wolf whistles!”

  Helen raised her hand. “Excuse me, Captain?”

  Walker frowned at her. “Nurse?”

  “If these men are to behave as soldiers, my experience with soldiers is that they do employ wolf whistles.”

  “What?”

  “Sailors, too.”

  “That has been your experience, has it?”

  Helen nodded.

  Captain Walker’s face reddened. “Well, then, you are on your own, Nurse. Don’t come running to me for help.” She sputtered, as if trying to jump-start another tirade but unable to get it going. Then she stormed out the way she’d come in.

  The second the doors closed, an odd shuffling noise broke out across the ward, a dulled slap from some corners, a thumping from others.

  Helen realized it was the sound of amputees clapping.

  BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN

  “Daley! Where’ve you been?” Anderson stormed up the walkway like he was escaping enemy fire. “This Easter church thing was your idea, in case you forgot.”

  Behind Andy, Lartz and two doctors from Iowa strolled up. Over the loudspeakers came a scratchy recording of some hymn Frank knew but couldn’t name. He glanced at his watch. He’d lost track of time waiting on the hospital steps for that nurse to come off fourth. He had to see her again.