Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [111]
She threw the towel over the line and glanced back over her shoulder as a dark, bulky shape dropped from the plane like an egg from a hen. There was thunder. A flash that cracked open the sky. The world roared. Went white.
53
One night when they still had the house and the electric kitchen; when they were doing all right, but doubts of another sort encroached, and she and Ben sat talking, Nancy had said, ‘We did the right thing,’ touching his hand, ‘didn’t we, Ben? Joey’s happy here. What sort of life would he have had in that place?’
But Ben’s reply seemed to be part of a different conversation: ‘What must it have been like, for her, knowing nothing of him?’
At the time Nancy had closed her mind to the question. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, she knows better. How would it have been for her, knowing Joey was out there in the world, growing up, being changed by it, and knowing nothing of him?
He calls himself Joe now, but to her he is still Joey; when she dreams of him, he is the child she remembers – brighthaired, running across a park or splashing towards her through a puddle, after rain, the sun catching the spray.
She cannot control her dreams, just as she cannot control the spasm of her heart as he comes towards her now off the train, a train disgorging soldiers, the platform crowded with mothers and wives, sweethearts and sisters.
His golden curls have gone, brutally shorn; a fine stubble veils his skull and his frame is thin and hard in the military uniform. She can discern scars, scatterings of imperfection: she is aware that the skin of his face is no longer smooth as a peeled egg, the way she remembers it. There is puckering at his eyes, and marks here and there, the aftermath of the lacerations and random injuries of warfare.
She watched the official homecoming on the newsreel in the local cinema: the music playing and flags flying, the President there in the rain to welcome the boys to Washington as heroes, though Nancy wished it could have been not Truman but Roosevelt, her old fallen idol, who had put boys like these – whole families – behind barbed wire at a time of paranoia. That would have had a satisfying irony.
But it’s over and here he is, with his unit, so few survivors, so many lost comrades, Japanese American bones sown in foreign fields where death and victory were harvested. The depleted 100th and 442nd, two regiments combined, much decorated, renamed the Purple Heart Battalion now, but she sees no pride in his face; only a long tiredness.
He reaches her and they hug, laughing, the way people do when words seem insufficient. She has to rise on tiptoe, stretch her neck to reach his face, and as she holds him close, another moment brushes her, his arms tight around her neck, a small body clinging – ‘This is my mom!’ A moment of frozen time.
Then he releases her, with a grin. ‘Hi, Nance.’ Ben’s name for her. She must stop thinking of him as a child.
She recalls words, heard often at services in church: ‘For with much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ They both have increased knowledge, and in Joey’s face she sees the loss of innocence.
And Joe, too, sees the sorrow that comes with knowledge, in the face she lifts to his.
When they reached the street, he stood on the sidewalk and stared at Louis and Mary’s old house, looked it over, smiling, surprised. In his absence it seemed to have acquired a pleasingly old-fashioned charm.
A passing couple, middle-aged, waved to Nancy from across the street and she waved back, calling out to them that this was her son, Joey, back from the war in Europe. The woman beamed and the man raised his hat, noted the decoration on Joe’s breast and called back what a great job the boys had