Dream When You're Feeling Blue (2 page)

“Mine will be fighting the
Nazis
!” she wailed.

“Well, I meant them, too!” the cabbie said. “Germans, Italians, Japanese. What d’ya think any of them scoundrels can do against our fine boys?” He looked into the rearview mirror at the girls, and Kitty saw the worry in his blue eyes, the doubt. It came to her to say, “My boyfriend will be fighting the Japs.” But it didn’t seem to make much difference, really. She and Louise stopped crying, but they held hands the rest of the way home.

I
T WAS THEIR YOUNGEST BROTHER’S HABIT
to nearly run over people when he was excited, then call out their names as though they had failed to see him. As soon as Kitty walked in the front door, Benjamin came skidding around the corner and his head butted her stomach. “Kitty! Kitty! Guess what?”

She lowered her face level with his and quietly acknowledged him. Sometimes this worked to calm him down. Not today, though, for he continued to yell and hop on one leg, saying, “We collected for rubber today? And guess what? Old Lady Clooney gave us her
girdle
!”

“Well, that was nice of her,” Kitty said, and Louise, hanging her jacket on the coat tree, said, “Don’t call her Old Lady, Binks.”

“She
is
old! And also she’s a lady. So? Old Lady. It’s just the same as Mister.”

Louise yanked at his brown hair, grown longer than usual. “You know what I mean.”

“You’re a young lady,” Binks told Louise. “Does it bother you to be called Young Lady?”

Louise tilted her head, thinking. “No.”

Binks showed her his upturned hands, the physical equivalent of saying
“So?”

“You’re exasperating,” Louise said and moved toward the kitchen.

“What’s that mean?” Binks called after her. “Louise! What’s
that
mean?”

“It means you’re interesting,” Kitty said and followed her sister. She felt guilty having her grief superseded by hunger, but there it was: she was ravenous.

Tish was kneeling before the oven, her head stuck in through the open door. Her blouse was hiked up on her back, and you could see two safety pins holding her skirt closed. She was terrible about mending. When it was her turn to sew buttons on Binks’s shirts, she’d say, “Oh, just wait a day or two and he’ll be too big for them anyway.”

“Hi,” they heard her muffled voice say.

“What are you
do
ing?” Kitty asked.

“Drying my hair,” Tish said. “It’s murder. But this is what I have to do because Ma won’t let me get a permanent wave.” She pulled her head out, sat back on her heels, and smiled at her sisters.

“A permanent wave is too expensive, and besides that it would ruin your hair,” Margaret said. She was standing at the counter, briskly stirring the contents of a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon. “Now shut that door, Tish; the oven won’t heat properly, and my cake will fall.”

Kitty clapped her hands together. “We’re having cake?”

“Make-do cake,” Margaret said.

“Oh.” Kitty hated the eggless, milkless, butterless recipe so prevalent now. She longed for the burnt-sugar cake with caramel icing they used to have for dessert every Sunday dinner. She wanted cookies around the house again: pineapple nut and pecan fingers, blond brownies and coconut dreams. She wanted jam squares and ginger cookies, chocolate drops and raisin crisps. Ah well.
Use it all, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
Kitty reached for an apple from the bowl on the table.

“Don’t eat that,” her mother said. “I need it for the red cabbage I’m making tonight.”

“I’m hungry!” Kitty said.

“You had breakfast not two hours ago.”

“Yes, but I’m
hungry.”

Her mother said nothing; the wooden spoon went round and round.

“I’m
suffering,”
Kitty said.

“I’ll remember you in my prayers along with the poor souls in purgatory,” Margaret told her. And then, “Tish! I told you to—”

“I
am
!” Tish shut the oven door and came to sit at the kitchen table with her sisters to sulk; she was a champion sulker. She reached up to adjust one of her pin curls and cried out, then blew on her fingers.

Kitty tsked and rolled her eyes. “What do you
expect
when you touch hot metal?”

“Why don’t you just let your hair dry naturally?” Louise asked.

“She can never wait for anything,” Kitty said, and Tish said, “I can so! You’re the one who can never wait for anything!”

“Are those my bobby pins, anyway?” Kitty asked, leaning forward to inspect Tish’s head.

“Is your name written on them?” Louise asked.

“Girls,” their mother said and poured her mix from the bowl into cake pans.

Binks had plunked himself in the middle of the kitchen floor to hold his knees to his chest and spin around in circles, singing in his high boy’s voice. Now he rose lightning fast and attached himself to his mother’s side. “Can I lick the bowl? Ma! Can I lick the bowl, please? Can I?”

“May
I.”

“May I lick the bowl, please?”

“No.”

“The spoon?”

“No.”

“Aw, gee whiz. Why?”

“Why
not.
Because you already had some. Remember, I gave you a spoonful? The rest goes to your sisters. You go outside now, find your brothers and play with them. But first run over and see if Mrs. Sullivan will trade me some of her coffee coupons for sugar. And wear your jacket. Zipped
up
!”

Their father complained mightily about “Roosevelt coffee,” the watered-down version they’d been drinking since the war began. According to their mother, the only coffee Frank Heaney liked was the kind his spoon would stand straight up in. She couldn’t make coffee like that when they got only a pound every five weeks. But oftentimes Mrs. Sullivan would make a deal, and then Margaret could at least occasionally offer Frank the rich-flavored brew he so liked.

Binks ran to the hall for his jacket, then raced out of the house, slamming the door so hard it made all the women jump. Margaret brought the mixing bowl over to the table for the sisters to share. Then, her voice low and careful, she asked, “How was it at the station?”

Tish pulled her finger out of the bowl and sat still to listen respectfully. Tears trembled in Louise’s eyes, so Kitty answered for both of them. “There were so many people there!”

“Did you cry?” Margaret asked.

“No,” Kitty said. “But Louise did.”

“Ah, well.” Margaret sat down heavily at the table with her daughters. “They’re fine boys, both of them.” Subtly, she turned the morning paper over, but not before her daughters saw the headlines. So many more lost. Every day, so many lost.

It grew silent then; there was only the steady ticking sound of the grandfather clock in the living room. And then Tish, reaching into the bowl to get a good fingerful of batter, suddenly froze. “Kitty. Is that…Are you wearing my
new blouse
? And
eating
in it?”

“It was just for this morning. I’m going to change in one second.”

“You didn’t even ask!”

Louise, ever the peacemaker, spoke soothingly. “She just wanted to look nice for Julian. You were sleeping, and she didn’t want to wake you.”

“My foot,” Tish said. “She never asks! She just goes in and takes whatever she wants! She thinks just because you’re the first one up, you can—”

“Girls!” Margaret said.

Kitty pushed away from the table. “Fine. I’ll go and change right now. But leave me some batter.” She hated the cake, but she was hungry, by God.

Tish sat back in her chair, her arms crossed, glaring at her sister. Then her eyes widened as Kitty stood. “And is that my
skirt
?”

Kitty bolted for the stairs, Tish right behind her, yelling about how she bet Kitty hadn’t even worn
underarm
shields and Kitty yelling back that she had too and that
she
wasn’t the one who perspired like a
pig
anyway. Louise looked at her mother and shrugged. Then she said, “Ma? Michael and I are sort of engaged.”

ON THE RADIO, BOB HOPE,
entertaining at a California boot camp, was doing a skit with a woman who had a most flirtatious voice. It was the kind of voice that sounded like a cat looked when you petted it and it arched its back in pleasure. The women was a blonde, Kitty thought as she dreamily mashed the potatoes. A starlet with a cherub bob, wearing a skintight sweater and an equally tight skirt. Kitty wanted to dress that way, but if she did, her mother would never let her out of the house. The girl was saying she’d been meaning to ask Bob if there were any sharks near San Diego. And here came Hope’s droll response: “Did you ever meet a Marine with a pair of dice?” Loud laughter from a large group of men. Kitty could imagine them, all those young men sitting on chairs and on the ground, looking up and smiling, all those white teeth, all those handsome faces.

“Kitty!” her mother said.

“Yes?”

“Get the potatoes on the table, I said. Here come the boys. I want you to make sure Billy gets his hands clean.”

That would be a challenge. Every night, the boys were meant to wash up in the metal pan in the kitchen sink before dinner. Binks complied, though frantically, and there was never a problem with freckle-faced Tommy, whose nature was so gentle it worried the rest of the family. But everything was an argument with Billy. His black hair was always a tangled mess, his shirt untucked, and his shoes unshined. He had difficulty finding nice friends; his latest companion was a boy named Anthony Mancini, who at eighteen was far too old for him. “But what do you
do
with him?” Margaret once asked, and Billy shrugged and said, “Nuttin’.” To which Margaret responded, “What was that? It sounded like English, but I’m not quite sure. Check your mouth and see if you don’t have Binks’s marbles in there.”

The back door flew open and here the boys came, moving together across the kitchen floor like a human tornado. Billy was first to the sink. “I don’t need that,” he said, pushing away the floating cake of Ivory. “I ain’t that dirty.”

“Billy,” Margaret said.

“What.”

“Language.”

“Oh. Sorry.
Me
ain’t that dirty.”

Margaret looked up from arranging pork chops on a platter. “Just keep it up.”

“Sure, whatever you say, Ma, I’ll do my best.” He pulled his hands out of the pan and reached toward Kitty and the towel. Kitty shook her head no. “C’mon, sis,” he said. “I’m starving.”

“Use the soap,” Kitty said. “Your hands are
black.”

“They ain’t black,” Billy said, but then the back door opened and their father walked in. Billy put his hands back in the sink and grabbed the soap. There was one person he would obey, and that was Frank Heaney, not out of fear but out of great love.

“Hi, Pop,” Kitty said.

Frank stopped dead in his tracks. “Why…is it
Kitty Heaney,
then? For the love of Mike, what are you doing here?”

She smiled at him. Always a joke with Frank Heaney.

“Hey, Pop,” Billy said. “Did you hear about Alan Betterman?”

“What about him?” Kitty asked. She had gone to school with him.

“I know him,” Tish said. “He’s dreamy. I used to have a crush on him.”

“Him and half the civilized world,” Louise said, from the table where she was laying out silverware. She got irritable when she was nervous: at dinner, her mother was going to tell Frank about her and Michael’s engagement. That afternoon, Louise had told her sisters about it, and she had said that if their father objected, she didn’t know what she’d do.

“Why would he object?” Tish had asked. “He loves Michael.”

“Lots of people say you should wait until the boy comes home to get married,” Louise had said. “I know a girl whose parents got really mad that she eloped with her guy who was going overseas, because what if he doesn’t come back? Then she’s a
widow.
And who would want a widow?”

“What do you mean?” Kitty had asked.

Louise had turned to stand so that Tish couldn’t see her. Then she’d whispered,
“Experienced.”

“I heard you!” Tish had said. “And I know exactly what you mean. You mean she’s not a virgin anymore, ’cause she had marital relations. Don’t worry, I know the score: she had
sexual intercourse.”

“Quiet!”
Louise and Kitty said together. Heaven forbid their mother hear any of her children say such a thing. Heaven forbid she find out that her daughters knew exactly what it meant. Not for nothing had Louise and Kitty pored over a book “for the married woman” they’d found one day when they were supposed to be cleaning out the attic. As for Tish, well, she always knew everything she wasn’t supposed to know.

As both Binks and Tommy waited their turn for the drying towel, Billy said, “Alan got killed in New Guinea. Got shot in the forehead.”

Kitty drew in a sharp breath. “Billy! Don’t
say
that!”

“It’s true!” he said. “His old lady told me. She started crying when she told me. She sure is sad.”

“Well, of course she’s sad!” Margaret cried.

“But wait,” Billy said. “She’s sad, but she said she’s also proud. And now her other son’s enlisting. In the Navy.”

“Pete?” Tish asked.

“Yeah, that’s his name.”

“I went ice skating with him!” Tish said.

“Tish,” their mother said. “Must
everything
have to do with your
social
life? Oh, poor Edith. I can’t imagine. Two sons. Poor woman.”

“Pete ain’t dead!” Billy said. “He’s joining the
Navy
!”

“I shall visit her tomorrow. And girls, I want each of you to write her a note tonight. Oh, right from our own neighborhood, God help us.”

Kitty thought of an incident in fifth grade, a time on the playground when she had enlisted other boys to tie Alan Betterman to a tree using the ribbons from her hair. It was because she was angry at him for trying to pull up her skirt. At the time, having Alan tied to the tree for the whole of recess seemed fitting—even mild—punishment. Now Kitty was sorry. Alan Betterman, with his brown eyes and high coloring. She wasn’t close friends with him—she’d seen him around, she’d always waved and said hello, but she’d known nothing about him, really. Only now she felt she’d lost a friend. And when she wrote the condolence card, she would mean it most sincerely. Last time she saw Alan, he’d been in line at the Majestic, his arm around a girl. Who? And did that girl know? And
…Julian.
She swallowed hard, then moved to take her place at the table.