MOM DIED ON MONDAY MORNING, June 6, 1955, about half an hour after she dropped me off at school in Kaiserslautern.
Everything after the crash—everything in the four weeks between Ramstein and New York City—was just a blur in my head, but I remembered that morning very clearly. It was raining; I remembered because I came downstairs in sandals and had to go back up for different shoes. It was the eleventh anniversary of D-Day, the day we stormed the beaches at Normandy—though of course Dad didn’t storm any beaches; he was flying sorties with Bomber Command, smashing German coastal defenses from the air. I would have remembered about D-Day anyway because I was writing about Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent and the only woman to go ashore with the invasion force, for my final paper in Mr. Spencer’s English class.
But the thing that really mattered about that morning was that it was the last Monday of the school year, the last full day of classes before graduation, and Mom had offered to let me ditch and go shopping with her in Mannheim instead.
She was lonely at Ramstein. Most of the other senior officers’ wives were rich or college-educated or both, especially the intelligence officers’ wives, and Mom was a farm kid from central Ohio who had worked a factory job during the war. She didn’t have very many friends at Ramstein—real friends, I mean, close friends—and in a few weeks she wouldn’t have me. We had made plans for me to spend the summer with Uncle Fred and Aunt Jean in the States, “reacclimating,” before the start of my fall term at college in Pennsylvania.
I turned her down. I had four years of perfect attendance records; I hadn’t even taken a sick day. I had already been accepted to Bryn Mawr, contingent on my final report card; and my marks were good enough; and I was admittedly such a teacher’s pet that cutting one day wasn’t going to change a thing, but I was proud of those attendance records. I was the sort of person who was proud of attendance records. Mom was the sort of person who would phone the school office with some made-up story about a dead great-aunt and spring me from classes for the day. She always told people I was more grown-up than she was. She was just eighteen when she had me—she and Dad married young, as people did in rural Ohio in the Depression—and I think she tended to think of herself more as my fun older sister, or maybe as my bad-apple friend, than as my mother.
She crashed on Autobahn 6 on the way into Mannheim. She was dead before the ambulance got there.
I was still alive because I had turned her down.
I thought about that a lot. The base chaplain at Ramstein said that was called survivor’s guilt, but I didn’t really feel guilty. I was just angry at how stupid it was. You were supposed to believe everything happened for a reason, there was no such thing as random chance, but the only reason I could see was this was God’s way of telling me I had done the right thing by not ditching class, and that was a stupid reason.
***
THREE WEEKS AFTER THE CRASH, Dad got our clearances for a Military Air Transport Service flight from West Germany to New York City and said we were moving back to the States.
He told me he had been ordered to report to a new station—Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. The clearances were for the following Monday, the Fourth of July; we had one week to pack. He didn’t tell me until we had touched down at Idlewild early on Tuesday morning that they wanted him at Griffiss immediately. In fact, they were sending a special transport plane, a Convair Samaritan, to take us up directly. That was VIP treatment. Normally they would just have us take a train or bus.
He told me this as we stood there alone on the Idlewild apron in the predawn half-light, waiting for our three suitcases and the cardboard box with Mom’s ashes, the city looming in the distance. The MATS flight had been empty except for the two of us and the five members of the flight crew, which in retrospect I should have noticed as unusual.
As if on cue, the promised Samaritan taxied up, propellers spiraling slowly out of sync.
I was stunned speechless, first. Up until that moment, I assumed we were taking Mom’s ashes back to Ohio. I hadn’t thought about it; I had just assumed. Both sets of grandparents were buried at Saint Joseph Cemetery in Columbus. I had just assumed we would be going to Columbus to put Mom’s ashes in the family plot before we went on to the new station.
Then I was angry.
I could take the rest of it—a week to pack seven years of our lives into suitcases, twenty hours of traveling. I didn’t care. But I thought they would give us time to bury her.
“I could go,” I said to Dad. We were alone in the cabin; once again we were the only ones on the plane except for the flight crew. We had been sitting in silence since takeoff. The only sounds were the drone of the engines and the steady, oddly comforting thrum of the propellers. The Manhattan skyline sparkled in pink-and-gold morning sunlight below us.
Dad said, “What?” He was looking over some papers in a file folder spread open on his lap. He had been looking over those same papers
since Frankfurt. He hadn’t slept a wink. Every time I looked over, he had his reading lamp on and that folder open. He kept flipping slowly through the pages one by one, coming to the end of the stack, starting over again. It was some sort of personnel file; I could see a photograph clipped on the first page. I had no idea whether he was actually reading it or just looking at it to keep his mind off things.
“I could go to Columbus,” I said. “I could stay with Uncle Fred and Aunt Jean. They were planning for me to come anyway.”
“We’ll both go,” Dad said, thumbing a page over, not looking up, “or we’ll find someplace up here.”
“She would want to be in Columbus.” As far as I knew, the only time Mom had ever been to New York was when we changed planes through Idlewild on the way to Germany seven years ago. She had never been upstate. Rome, New York, wouldn’t mean anything to her. I hated the thought of leaving her ashes in a place that didn’t mean anything.
“So we’ll both go,” Dad repeated, “as soon as I’m done with this.”
“What does that mean, when you’re done?”
“As soon as this assignment’s done.”
“When is the assignment going to be done?”
“Couple of days.”
“Then I don’t see why I couldn’t just go ahead and—”
“No,” he said, in a tone that said And that’s that—and it struck me in that moment that he must have been the one who requested we go straight to Griffiss.
I should have put it together. I should have known from that empty MATS flight. They wouldn’t have flown us out on the Fourth of July unless Dad had put in the request himself.
He had done the same thing seven years ago. He had packed us up and moved us to Germany less than a month after Grandma died. Everybody has their own way with grief, the base chaplain at Ramstein said, and this was Dad’s—to throw himself into a new project, to lose himself absolutely in his work. I should have put it together.
He must have felt the anger in my silence. He looked up from his papers, his face softening just a little.
“It’s just for a couple of days, Shel. They need me to deal with this. Just for a couple of days. Then we’ll go. I’ll take some leave days, and we’ll go out to Columbus. Okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered.
He hesitated. I thought for a moment he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He just reached across the seat arm and took my hand. He did it slowly, stiffly, a little self-consciously; it wasn’t the sort of thing that came naturally to him. But he held on tight. His hands were strong and callused—working-class hands, unexpected for an intelligence officer, a guy with a desk job.
He hadn’t started in the ACTS, the officers’ school. He had earned his commission during the war as an enlisted airman.
He held my hand for the rest of the hour-long flight. I fell asleep at some point and didn’t wake up until I heard the bump and whir of the landing gear opening beneath us, and in the meantime he had gone back to looking at those papers on his lap. But he hadn’t let go of my hand.
THEY HAD A RENTAL CAR waiting for us on the apron at Griffiss. Dad drove me out to the housing development, Birchwood Park, and let me off in the driveway with the house key, the suitcases, and the box with Mom’s ashes. Then he went back up to base. He promised he would be back for dinner. We would dress up and go downtown and find something nice. My first real, grown-up American dinner. I had been eleven years old when we moved to Germany.
The house was brand-new—small and modest, two bedrooms and two baths all on a single floor in ranch style, but so new the paint still looked wet. I left the luggage on the front stoop and spent a little while walking through the empty rooms, switching on lights and looking in closets and pulling up the ugly preinstalled aluminum blinds so I could open the windows. The air was thick and heavy with the chemical smell of new carpet. This was a new development, Birchwood Park. We were one of the first families to move in; most of the other lots were empty. The unfinished cul-de-sac stopped dead in the tall yellow Indian grass just past our house. A long, snaking arm of woods lay beyond—somber, ancient pines and silvery gray birches—and then the river, the Mohawk, running southward to join the Erie Canal. The names—Mohawk River, Erie Canal—were all something out of history books or James Fenimore Cooper. This house felt wrong here—ugly and modern and out of place. I felt wrong here. I felt the odd need to walk on tiptoes in this house, as if I were an intruder.
The girl came walking up out of the woods while I was wrestling the last suitcase over the threshold. She walked out of the grass and paused on the sparkling asphalt pavement, brushing at her slacks and inspecting each ankle one after the other—being careful about ticks, I supposed. She was carrying one of those boxed watercolor sets in her hand and a lightweight traveling easel in a case on her shoulder.
“Hello!” she called to me, and then she came running over at a smooth, easy little
jog, holding on to her impressively brimmed sun hat with her free hand. “Hello. How do you do?” she said again when she got closer, letting go of the hat to extend that slim, manicured hand to me. Sunlight flashed on the lenses of her Aviators. “I’m Jo. Jo Matheson.”
For a moment, I just gaped at her. She looked as if she had stepped right out of the summer issue of Vogue, certainly not as if she had just stepped out of the woods behind my house. She wore a gauzy, sleeveless white blouse—tied up about the waist so you could see just a peek of tanned midriff—and trim tan slacks and Capezio flats. Her sleek, dark hair, framing her rather sharp elfin face beneath the hat, was fashionably short and tousled, like an Italian starlet’s—the Gina Lollobrigida look, if Gina Lollobrigida were for some reason wandering around the woods of upstate New York.
“I saw your car,” she explained. “I was down at the river.”
I swept a useless hand over my rumpled skirt and an equally useless hand through my blond bob, plastered a smile on, and took her hand, feeling flushed and sticky and ungraceful.
“Shelby Blaine,” I said.
“Shelby.” The girl, Jo, gave me a quick, brilliant smile as she squeezed my fingers and dropped them. “That was your—”
“Dad—yes. Colonel Robert Blaine. He’s with intelligence at the base. Or he will be. We just got here.”
“He must be here because of that pilot,” she said.
“The pilot?”
“The Russian.”
She must have seen the sheer confusion on my face.
“That’s all right,” she said. “The only reason I know anything about it is because I’m supposed to throw a party for him.”
“A party for a Russian pilot,” I repeated stupidly.
“Oh—he’s a defector. He’s here for a debriefing or something. They’re sending him up from Washington, and I’m supposed to give him a party. You know—show him how we do it in the free world. I’m chair of the base events committee.”
I wouldn’t in a million years have pegged her as “chair of the base events committee.” I wasn’t sure how old she was. She was one of those people who could believably be anywhere from eighteen to thirty. But “chair of the base events committee” brought up mental pictures of a stiff, grim, tight-mouthed older lady, a senior officer’s wife, who wore boxy tweed suits and
outdated netted hats with fake cherries and who looked as if she disapproved of the world in general and girls in midriff tops and slacks in particular.
“Dad didn’t say anything about a Russian pilot,” I said carefully, turning this over in my head. He hadn’t told me anything at all about this assignment. It was important enough that Mom’s funeral could wait while he dealt with it; that was all I knew.
“Well, that’s probably why he’s with intelligence and I’m chair of the events committee,” Jo said. “He can keep his mouth shut.” She eyed me and seemed to come to a belated realization. “You’re here all by yourself?”
“It’s me and Dad.”
Her gaze traveled past me through the open doorway to linger on our three sad suitcases and the box with Mom’s ashes. “Where have you come from?”
“West Germany. Ramstein. Dad just transferred.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to grill you,” she said. “I’m sure you want to nap or something.”
“That would be nice,” I agreed a little coolly.
“When do your things get here?”
“Things?”
“Your furniture and things.” She was still looking pointedly at the suitcases.
I had no idea. I remembered Dad talking to somebody over the phone about furniture last week, ...
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