Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [150]
Whether they were all right or not, the prisoners never revealed the truth when the opportunity came to send their first postcards home. The 1929 Geneva Convention provided in Article 36 that every prisoner be allowed to send a postcard to his family “within a period of not more than one week after his arrival at the camp” and that “said postcards shall be forwarded as rapidly as possible and may not be delayed in any manner.”
With Japan having declined to ratify the convention, the least of the worries occupying Colonel Nagatomo, Captain Mizutani, or anyone else in the Fifth and Ninth Railway Regiments was the timeliness of their prisoners’ personal correspondence. Reflecting their regard for the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose parcels and provisions, meant for prisoners, they were well known to have plundered, the Japanese authorities dallied in delivering the prisoners’ later mailings via the Red Cross and the Swiss Consulate General. Luther Prunty, out in the jungle one day gathering wood for the 80 Kilo Camp kitchen, turned over a log and found a whole stash of completed postcards rotting in the sodden earth.
If news was vital for the prisoners’ morale, information about them was no less vital to loved ones back home. The absence of word concerning the fate of their men kept alive an agonizing mystery and extracted a heavy psychic cost. With her husband missing along with his ship, with hard facts of the where and how so damnably few, Jane Harris, at home in Los Angeles, restored her emotional equilibrium by filling her life with denial and distraction. These provided a layer of insulation between her imagination and her subconscious. It kept them from colluding in their corrosive, whispering work.
She denied the thought that a new wife’s worst fear—sudden, unforeseen widowhood—had probably already been realized. Since she could not know for sure, she went to work to keep herself productively focused, to avoid losing her mind. But at her desk in the payroll department at Bullock’s department store, she could never for long avoid thinking of Lanson Harris or the Houston, the ship he had called home for more than a year. Until that day came, she would suffer with a monthly reminder of the misery in her life when the allotment of her husband’s salary showed up in the mail.
She quit Bullock’s after a year, took a job with some friends at a company that made window blinds, then moved to the Continental Can Company as a contometer operator. That rudimentary computer was useful for keeping the books, but it could not begin to help her figure the unknowable odds of her husband’s safe return.
Anything less than a letter or a call from Lans himself would not satisfy her. She drove down to San Diego periodically on weekends to see old friends and to visit other wives who stood on the brink of widowhood with husbands missing in action on Bataan or Corregidor. One of her friends was married to a pilot who had flown General MacArthur out of Manila. The women all had plenty of time to contemplate the permutations of fortune that might have befallen their men.
She wasn’t forced to confront her subconscious assumptions until her friends started urging her to visit the Army hospital and file a life insurance claim. “They said, ‘You might as well go over and they’ll settle with you and you’ll get your insurance started.’” But she wasn’t ready to give up on the man she had last seen more than two years before. “I said, ‘No, because he’s not dead yet.’ They said, ‘You’re crazy. You should go over there and get the money.’”
She settled into the role of widow-in-waiting, trying to be a rock of strength for her grief-stricken family. Finally it caught up with her. She clung to her job to the detriment of her health. Saddled with sudden abdominal pains, she saw her doctor and learned she needed an exploratory procedure. But the idea of taking off work and submitting to hospitalization was intolerable