Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [151]
Had she known that she suffered from severe appendicitis, she might have beaten her fear of sitting in a silent hospital room where dark thoughts could emerge unsuppressed. Only when she was delirious with pain and on the brink of physical collapse—her doctor found that her appendix had burst—was she finally rushed into surgery. The ether and the anesthetic did what bromides from friends and family seemed never to do. They set her apart from the troubled earth. From within the gauzy shroud of medication she told the doctor, “Don’t let me come to.” She felt good. The weight was gone. They told her she had to wake up. She refused. She refused for three full weeks and stayed right there at White Memorial Hospital, clinging to sedation.
The emotional insulation of the work routine was finally pierced shortly before Christmas 1943 when the postman showed up and said, “Jane, you’ve got a funny-looking thing here.” It was a postcard from her husband.
The three-by-five piece of weathered cardstock was stamped with an alien-sounding name: Moulmein, Burma. It carried no date. “How it got through the censors, I don’t know,” she said. How it had gotten from the Japanese to the Americans was equally a mystery. She took it to the Navy Department, showed it to a chaplain, then to an administrator. They wanted her to turn it over to them. She gave them a copy but retained the original.
With her husband’s status indisputably converted from MIA to POW, Jane began going to the Red Cross, putting together little packages of toothpaste and other sundries and writing banal letters designed to clear the censors and reach this place, Moulmein, by whatever magical means the International Red Cross had devised to bridge the gap between warring enemies. But even as the news relieved some anxiety and made possible proactive courses of action, it raised other worries. The terse, preprinted multiple-choice messages on the card—“My health is (good, usual, poor). I have/have not had any illness” and so on—also seemed to worsen the anguish felt by Lanson’s grandfather. When he read the postcard he sat down and cried, because the confirmation of Lans’s survival also meant that his grandson was languishing in captivity. The older man passed away a few months later. “The only thing we could figure was that he died of grief,” Jane said.
During the war, self-help books and magazines such as House Beautiful and Good Housekeeping were catering to the needs of wives whose husbands were off to war. “You come home from the station or airport or the little gray ferry and it seems like a farewell to everything about life you love. The everybody’s-home-now feeling of a man in the house. The solid companionship of two big bath towels in the bathroom, two pairs of slippers under the bed, two people talking in the privacy of their souls,” one article read. The slicks were full of coping tips for soldiers’ and sailors’ wives. It was all so clean and sane and sound. Alleta Sullivan, a mother from Waterloo, Iowa, who lost all five of her sons in the sinking of the cruiser USS Juneau and thereby became America’s eternal symbol of wartime grief, counseled readers of The American Magazine that they should discount rumors of their loved one’s death, even though it was by just such a rumor that she found out the worst had befallen her boys. She described her work touring the country visiting shipyards and factories, exhorting the workers to greater efficiency. But there was closure and finality in the brand of grief that Mrs. Sullivan had experienced. It required people to regroup and move on. Jane Harris couldn’t do that. Her husband’s survival had been established as of a certain date. But what of the intervening time? What of the future? No doubt the well-intentioned magazine editors had a bargeload of good advice for her. Still, the chemical comfort of a White Memorial recovery room was the most peaceful of all sanctuaries.
A Portland man