The Gathering Storm (30 page)

hands

embrace me

before

I see

you

rosetree

white

roses

seeking

light

you

climb

joy

spilling

over

impossible

walls

tenacious

promise

full

bloom

lavish

expectant

you

raise

your

face

shine

beautiful

epitome

revealed

fulfilled

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I read each word again and again, grouping them in different combinations, like bouquets of roses. Each time I read his poem I found a new and different meaning.

My heart heard the breathless rhythm of love and hope.

The London heat was oppressive. Citizens lounged in the parks and
slept on roofs and balconies. My little office doubled as my sleeping
quarters since Mac and Eva had taken over the flat. It had only one tiny window that would not open more than a few inches.

It was almost teatime. Eben, visiting the shelter with members of the Jewish Agency, poked his head in the door and called me to come join them. I stood up from my desk and suddenly the room began to spin. The air turned pale yellow. Suddenly everything went black.

I awakened on the floor. Eben fanned me with a magazine as worried faces of strangers peered down at me. One of the contingent was a physician. He checked my pulse and listened to my heart, and with a disapproving look at my cot in the corner, asked me if I had a home and if I ever left St. Mark's.

Hermione in her high-pitched, public school accent declared I had given up my own flat for newlyweds. "She has barely seen the outside of St. Mark's since Eva's wedding! She stays in here all day and all night, too."

I simply lay on the floor, too hot and weak to stand. I did not have to answer even one question.

The doctor declared, "Young woman, sleeping and bathing and
eating among the ebb and flow of strangers for weeks on end is wearing on anyone. You must return to your own flat for a few days' rest."

Hermione clucked her tongue in sympathetic agreement. "My dear, Eva and Mac have had your house to themselves quite long
enough, I should say. You've given them a decent interval alone. Go
home tonight. Sleep in your own bed."

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The memory of my Primrose Hill bedroom seemed like a distant dream. The thought of a good long soak in a cool tub sounded like heaven. Eva and I had shared a room for months. I imagined she and Mac had pushed our twin beds together and made one big bed. I could sleep in Jessica's old room. A private bedroom and a WC, a kitchen, and a sitting room with a piano sounded like a mansion after sharing a lavatory with a hundred women and children.

Eben drove me home to my little Primrose Hill flat and helped me to the door. I heard the phonograph playing. I went no further than the front steps. "I'm not bursting in. I won't go in there alone unless I know I'm not interrupting anything."

"I'll have to put my foot down. No Rudy Vallee, eh? No tango in
the middle of the night. You need your rest. Yes. I can see it here in the light. You have lost the bloom on your cheeks."

He knocked loudly, then rang the buzzer. After a time Eva answered, peering cautiously through the crack in the door. Her
eyes were red and puffy. She had been crying, and when she saw me
on the step, rushed to embrace me.

It seems I had returned home just in time for the newlyweds' first spat.

Eben observed me holding Eva in my arms. He gave me an
admonition, "If it gets too difficult, I will share my little garret room
in Hampstead with you. Everyone in London is sleeping around."

I looked at him with indignation. "I will not, and no, you most certainly will not."

He saluted and grinned. "My apologies. Of course. What I mean
is, you may have the use of my place, and I will go...somewhere else.
The tube stations are all converted into sleeping quarters in the event of air raids. Very democratic. Rich and poor alike. I will take my pillow to the High Street tube station and no one will think the worse for me if I sleep on the platform."

Eva was sobbing and muttering in incoherent English. There was something about the prime minister's wife and Mac being humiliated. She would not tell me more. Eva ran into the house.

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My shoulder was damp from Eva's tears.

Eben asked, "Are you certain about staying? Mac would say, 'Out of the frying pan and into the fire.'"

I thanked Eben for his offer. "Very gallant of you. But I think we
will manage well enough."

"We shall see. And now, my dear Lora, I wish you good luck and
bid you good sleep."

I entered the flat and saw the program for the government press reception on the entry table. The importance of the day for Eva came flooding back.

Today had been the foreign press meeting with Prime Minister Churchill at Number 10, Downing Street. Mac had arranged for Eva to attend with him and meet Mr. Churchill. For days, Mac had coached her in protocol. Eva had practiced exactly what she would say to the eminent leader of wartime Britain.

Something had gone terribly wrong. Eva sat alone at our dining table. Her head was cradled in her hands. She glanced up at me through red, swollen eyes.

"Why are you crying?" I asked, hanging my umbrella on the hook beside the door.

She shook her head like a small child trying to deny the obvious. "This marriage! I am out of the frying pan and into the tea kettle!"

"I see," I said.

She dabbed her eyes, wanting me to see that she had indeed been
crying and would continue to do so. She asked through plugged sinuses, "How was your day?" The question was followed by loud sniffing, and then honking, as she blew her nose on a kerchief.

I started to tell her everything but thought better of it. Eva was making it clear that the conversation would be about her, no matter where we began.

She attempted to smile through her tears. "Oh, Lora. Me and Mac are not okie-dokie."

"Where's Mac?" I asked, suddenly alarmed.

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"Off to the public house, I suppose. Dowsing his unhappinesses while I am sobbing over split milk."

I mentally translated. Mac was drowning his sorrows, and Eva was crying over spilt milk. "Eva, why don't you tell me in French what has happened."

Her head wagged broader than before. "I promised Mac only English. How will I ever be a real American if I can't get it right?"

"I understand," I said, comprehending the importance of mastering the language of her new life. "But whatever has happened?"

Her shoulders shook. She could barely speak. "I have hit my head upon a stony wall." More sobs followed.

I made a pot of weak tea, fetched two mismatched china cups, and sat opposite her. "Here. A cuppa, as the natives say."

"I do not care what they call it," she muttered in perfectly correct French. Then back to American, "Absolution I am a failure. I did not get it right."

"What didn't you get right?"

"Mac told me what I must say when meeting Mister Churchill at the foreign press meeting. I practiced. You heard me. Night after night. I am bird in a fool's gilded lily."

"I won't make you explain it."

"Please, don't. I got it right with the Prime Minister, Lora. But no one told me she would be there too."

"She?"

"Churchill's wife. Clemmie."

"Oh."

"I had to speak to her, didn't I?"

"Unavoidable, I suppose."

"I did my best. First I addressed Mister Churchill. All very proper. And how do you do, Mister Prime Minister.' But then there SHE was. And so I said, 'I am very also pleased to meet you, dear Prime Mistress." Poor Eva's shoulders shook as she confessed. "Prime Mistress! Oh, dear me! I am not okie-dokie!"

I patted her back. "Poor Eva. Perhaps she didn't notice."

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"Notice! The whole room fell silent. Mac turned as red as that."
She pointed to the red book cover of her copy of
Proper Etiquette in
British Diplomatic Society.

The key turned in the latch. Mac was home. Eva covered her face with her hands. Mac, disheveled and remorseful, appeared in the kitchen door. His sorrowful eyes, well drowned in good English beer and split milk, were riveted on Eva.

"Good evening, Mac," I said.

He did not appear to hear me but rushed past me to the empty chair beside Eva. He grasped her hands and kissed her fingers. She began to weep and threw herself into his arms. The two embraced and kissed as I cleared the table and padded upstairs to my room. Behind me I could hear Eva as she apologized in a gush of unstoppable Polish for whatever verbal gaffe she had made when addressing the prime minister.

"It's okay, my darling. My darling Eva. No. No. Please. It doesn't
matter to me. My fault. My fault entirely. Please, my darling..."

I climbed into bed as the sound of the Rudy Vallee tango pursued me. Muffled voices seeped under my door. Covering my head with the pillow, I must have slept a little.

I wasn't sorry when the air-raid siren sounded some hours later, and I bumbled out of the house and into the shelter.

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T

he air-raid siren sounded again as I crossed Regent's Park on foot the next evening. I did not believe the danger could be real. How many times had pilots from the German Luftwaffe flown harmlessly above London on their way to industrial targets in the Midlands?

The lovely parklands had been dug up—subdivided into allotments for vegetable gardens among the ack-ack guns. A small portion of the rose garden near the Open Air Theatre remained intact.

As the warning siren screamed, irritated Londoners hurried to shelter. I found a park bench and sat beside a glorious plot of white roses. Fragrant red roses bloomed nearby.

I thought that soon the shrill warning would fall silent, and I would be alone above ground in a deserted world. If a bomb tumbled on my head, I thought, then I would be in heaven with Papa and Mama and Varrick. So much the better. I was not afraid of anything.

Sighing with contentment, I looked up at the ripening colors of twilight. Silence dropped like a curtain. I could not see the enemy planes, but after some minutes I heard a distant drone of aircraft engines. By and by the crack of fighter plane machine guns popped above the clouds.

I prayed for the brave British pilots, so outnumbered and outgunned. I knew they were sure to be victorious because they were fighting against the most profound evil in all of history. Surely God

245

was paying attention. No doubt there were angels soaring above England.

Then my thoughts went to the German boys I had known before Hitler stole their minds and ravaged their hearts. Were any of my neighbors or schoolmates dropping bombs on England now? I prayed for dying Nazi pilots who, spiraling to earth in burning planes, would feel the fires of hell even before they reached their final eternal destination.

Could young men be fighting for their lives? It seemed impossible. The sky above me was so beautiful. Such beauty made me hate the war more fiercely. Young men should not have been dueling and dying on such a night as this.

I rummaged in my handbag, removing Eben's photographs and the white rose poem. On my knee I balanced the image of me smiling beside Papa. Once again I scanned the words inscribed on the
thirty-six roses:
Sweet.. .familiar.. .scent... embrace... me... before. ..I...
see...you....

In the quiet of a city waiting breathlessly for destruction, I heard the plaintive call of a nightingale perched on the limb of an elm tree. Glancing up I saw a middle-aged woman with a pleasant, close-lipped smile observing me from a park bench across the path. She was dressed in a shabby blue dress, at least two decades out of fashion. Her gray-streaked, tawny hair was tied back and tucked beneath a straw boater-style hat. Her shoes were low-heeled and scuffed. Her hands were folded in her lap.

"Good evening," I said when she did not look away from me.

"Good evening." She looked up at the pink-tinged thunder-heads. "Such a beautiful sunset tonight."