“Of course. What’s your girl’s name?” Hazel asked.
“Eileen. I write to her every week, without fail. But I haven’t heard from her in three months. Do you think I’ve done something wrong? Or maybe she hasn’t gotten my letters and thinks I’m dead? I don’t know if I could stand that.”
Hazel thought of her brother, who hadn’t had a girl back home. Who hadn’t had time to send even one letter to his family before they got word of his death. Her mother had opened the door to the two men in uniform and brought them into the living room, where Hazel sat reading to her father in his wheelchair. She remembered thinking that she hoped the soldiers weren’t shocked by what they saw, the scripts and books lying about, the missing button on her father’s cardigan, the dust motes dancing in the sunlight. That’s what she remembered most about that moment. The dust motes, as she willed the men not to speak.
“Benny’s all right, yes?” Her mother’s chin wobbled.
They’d launched into a prepared speech. Said he’d been killed in a plane crash behind enemy lines. Said that he had not survived. Said that he was a hero.
“Where did it happen?” Ruth asked.
“We’re not at liberty to say, ma’am,” answered one of them.
“Was it quick?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
But Hazel could tell the answer was a lie. They didn’t know the circumstances, any more than she and her parents did. It was all a haze, like the stifling air inside the room.
The family came apart without Ben. He was the glue, the silly clown, the sweet prince that Ruth doted on. Hazel’s father didn’t show much emotion, and his disability made it difficult in any event. But Ruth emoted enough for the three of them put together, except for once at the wake, when Hazel looked up from pouring out cups of coffee to see her mother studying her intently, her eyes clear and dry. “I guess you’ll do, God help us,” Ruth had said, before retreating into the living room to weep in the arms of strangers.
As if he’d picked up on her thoughts, the boy from Kansas began to tear up. Hazel shifted her chair closer, asking him questions to distract him from the girl Eileen. About his favorite K rations, and what made him laugh. What were his favorite films? Who did he look up to and admire?
As they talked, she realized that this was how she could create the soldier hero for the broadcast. By interviewing the men and summing up their stories of bravery and humility. She couldn’t wait to get back to the tent, pull out her notebook, and jot down some notes from the conversation.
“Hey, look, Hazel!” Verna pointed from across the table. “Floyd’s done you, too.”
Hazel hadn’t even noticed the kid had pulled up a chair nearby. He carefully ripped the paper from the pad and handed it over.
He’d gotten the basics right. Her shoulder-length blond hair, with its curled tips. Her blue eyes and arched eyebrows, which she had to pencil in. Unlike Maxine’s portrait, hers was not even a caricature, because nothing about her stood out.
What surprised her was that she didn’t mind, really. The work she and Maxine were doing for the army, as well as their personal mission to get justice for Paul, was suddenly bigger and more vibrant than everything else in Hazel’s life. She had never been the type of girl to fixate on her appearance, but now it was an afterthought at best; she was far more interested in what she was doing than what she looked like.
She smiled and thanked the boy for his drawing, rolling it up just as Maxine wandered over, carrying a box that clinked as she carefully set it down.
Their bribe had been procured.
CHAPTER THREE
Maxine
May 7, 1945
We managed to get into the jail to see the boy, Paul. They locked us inside his tiny cell with him while we talked, probably to keep us safe from the other prisoners, whose shouts and whistles echoed off the stone walls.
Right after we got back to camp, I dictated the basics of the conversation to Hazel and we sent it off to the colonel, convincing one of the drivers to hand deliver it today.
Now we wait, but I can’t get him out of my head. Our report didn’t say everything, like how the Italian guard eyed me up and down as I handed over the bottles of beer, and how glad I was to have Hazel next to me at that moment. That the cell Paul was kept in smelled like rancid meat.
So I’m writing it down myself. I have to, or I’ll go mad with the waiting. We’re not supposed to keep diaries, but I have to get these images out of my head and onto the page, so they don’t haunt me anymore.
Inside his dingy cell, Paul talked with great detail, straining to make the story as vivid as possible, knowing that Hazel and I were most likely the only people who cared what happened to him.
The report didn’t say that the first thing he did was pull out a ragged photo of his mother from his pocket, the words “Greta, Age 28” scribbled on the back. She had pale hair and eyes and looked like a ghost, and he told of his father’s cruelty, how the beatings were more frequent as the German forces lost their hold. Greta disappeared two days after they’d been abandoned by his father, having gone out to find them some food. Rumor was she’d been drowned in the river by some villagers, held down until she stopped squirming. Paul had sought shelter in the home of his friend, Matteo, and they’d hidden him away, kept him safe.
The report didn’t talk about the stretches of boredom as he cowered in the basement, staying quiet when a neighbor dropped by unexpectedly, of playing card games with Matteo to pass the time. Of their deepening friendship, and how worried he was that Matteo wouldn’t be delivered home safely from Naples.
Before, when the Germans were in control, Paul would creep into his father’s study late at night and copy the maps laid out on the oak desk as best he could. He’d bring them to Matteo, who’d pass them on to the Italians fighting against the Germans. I asked him why he did this, and he said it was revenge for his father’s cruelty toward his mother, for the suffering of Matteo and his family. A way to sabotage the Nazi war machine from the inside.
I wondered if he’d been drafted into the role of spy—if Matteo’s family had homed in on him as someone to be manipulated into doing the bidding of the resistance. He talked about Matteo as if he were his own brother, how their bond was unbreakable. As his tears fell in dirty tracks down his cheeks, Hazel asked what he was saying and I told her. She said to tell him that one day maybe he and Matteo would see each other again. I didn’t bother translating that back to him. I didn’t want to give him false hope.
A blind rage seized me in that moment, out of nowhere, at the fact that this kid had been dismissed by his own father. I knew that feeling well, but at least my grandmother had stepped into the void and made my childhood bearable. Paul was so young and vulnerable, yet had been so brave. I recognized the pride in his voice as he spoke of channeling his confusion and distress, becoming a fighter for a cause he believed in. I understood his pain.
Paul told of traveling by night on stolen bicycles, how the freedom of being out in the world, of the scents and sounds of the earth, gave him courage. Until Naples, when they’d been flushed from their daytime hiding place and quickly surrounded.
The report was full of details of the maps he’d copied, the plans he’d handed over, and the names of the people who might vouch for him. It didn’t say that since being put in the jail, he’d been kept in solitary confinement. The report didn’t include the way he reached out as we got up to go, wanting to touch us but knowing that he was filthy and unwashed and that we’d be repulsed. Or how Hazel marched right over and held him close anyway, and then I did, too, stroking his hair as he wept.
“Have you heard the news?”
Betty-Lou burst into the tent, brimming with excitement. Hazel and I exchanged looks. Neither of us had felt like venturing out that day, not after seeing Paul so wretched. At least Hazel’s script for her “American Hero” idea impressed Colonel Peterson to no end, which meant we could keep going back. The subject was a sweet kid from Kansas who has a girl back home, can’t wait to see her, aw shucks, happy to be righting Hitler’s wrongs in the meantime. Bringing order to chaos. It started out corny but by the end I was stifling a sob on air.