Land of Dreams: A Novel (28 page)

“The telephone’s been hopping all afternoon,” Bridie said, the moment I walked in the door. Tom wheeled a truck past my feet—“Varoooom!”—followed by one of the neighbor’s children chasing after him with a wooden airplane.

As Tom turned and careered past me again, I grabbed him by the waist and tackled him into a hug. For a moment I forgot I was having a bad day. “Who was it?” I asked, kissing my big baby’s cheek as he pulled away, embarrassed in front of his friend.

“Damned if I know,” Bridie said. “I’d never touch one of those wretched things. Dangerous, full of electric—sure, you wouldn’t know what’d happen to you.”

“It was Jackson,” Leo said, poking his head around the door. “He rang four times this afternoon, looking for you—dashed inconvenient if you ask me”—my eldest son’s latest fad was talking like the English actor Trevor Howard—as I’d been waiting for a call from Freddie. He was talking to the studio about my contract today. Where’ve you been?”

The phone rang and my stomach tightened. I picked up the receiver quickly, before I had the chance to think. Leo stood glaring at me for a moment, until I dismissed him with a shake of my head. It was Jackson.

“What the hell did you think you were doing?” he shouted down the line.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I am
so
sorry. I know I did the wrong thing, but believe me, Jackson, I never meant to cause any—”

“Don’t you try to justify what you have done . . .” I let him go on without interruption. There was no point interspersing his anger with empty apologies. It’s the rare person, I realized as he was talking, who sets out to cause harm. Noble intentions are easy; it is having the intelligence to carry them through with thoughtfulness and due consideration that ultimately sets an act out as good or bad. My actions had disastrous consequences, so however good my intentions were, I had done a bad, bad thing. After all, most wars are fought in the name of God, or with the weight of good intention behind them, and what do the good intentions of the politicians mean for the dead soldiers, the wounded men, the widowed wives, the orphaned children? Fighting on principle only works when your sword is weighted with wisdom. I had not acted wisely in chasing off to Manzanar. I could say I was sorry—argue my good intentions—but what would be the point of that? Suri and her family, including Jackson, had suffered because of my rash decision to “rescue” them.

I wondered, as he was ranting, how many of the good things in my life that I had done—starting up the cooperative in Yonkers, adopting two other women’s children—had been done from purely altruistic motives. None. I had long since known that. Others might disagree (Maureen often described me as a “saint”), but my actions in helping others were almost always born of my need to be needed. I did not delude myself in believing that I was a truly “good” person; while I had seen that the world was full of do-gooders, very few people I had ever met were truly unselfish. Where I had acted out of turn with Suri was not in trying to do the right thing by her, but in the overwhelming and arrogant conviction that I was “right.” When had I become this strident woman who had to be “right” all the time? That was my downfall; I had made an error of judgment by following the assumption that I was right.

As I had grown older I had also come to believe that my life experience—living through two depressions, one in Ireland and one in America, losing two husbands, then mothering two sons—had qualified me with some great insight. This belief in my own absolute wisdom had become stronger and stronger of late, until I had somehow come to believe that I was right about everything! People challenged me—Leo, Bridie, Hilla—but their objections were easily rebuffed by my unshakable self-conviction. Remarkably, it now seemed to me, in the face of my appalling mistake, this was the first occasion in my life when I had displayed a severe error of judgment to such an extreme degree.

“I suppose you know that they interrogated Stanislaw about all this?”

The words shocked me out of my humbling thoughts and caused me to blurt out, unintentionally rudely, “
What?
”

“Oh yes. Some heavy-looking guys in smart suits called by to see me earlier, with Stan in the back of their shiny black car. He looked pretty shook up, as you can imagine. They wouldn’t even let him out to talk to me, just asked if I knew him. They picked him up this afternoon, after your little show out in Manzanar. Seems he had gone to the mayor’s office and made a fuss for you early this morning—and somebody made a call to somebody else and they made a connection. There’s quite a network of spies in the government; there is nothing these guys don’t know—and they call
us
spies. They didn’t bother bringing me in, because they had already checked me out before they interned Suri—but they’re
very
interested in Stan, by the look of them. They’ll have him pegged as a Nazi spy is my guess; these dimwit amateur cops can’t tell Jews and Nazis apart—we’re all just foreigners to them. So congratulations: you got my wife and my best friend in serious trouble, all in one day!”

I could not believe this. How could I have caused such carnage? I had been feckless with Stan’s feelings for me. I had done the one thing I had never wanted to do: manipulate a man’s soft feelings for me and cause him harm as a result. Jackson was angry. I didn’t blame him.

“Who were they?” I asked. “The police? The army? Where did they take him?”

He let out a dry laugh.

“You’ve gotta be kidding—you think I’m gonna let you near this?”

“You’ve got to let me help him . . .”

“Like you ‘helped’ my wife?”

“This is
my
mess, Jackson—not yours. Let me clean it up. Please.”

He paused. Seeming to calm down, he came back with a better story.

“They weren’t in uniform, so I reckon it was the OSS—Office of Strategic Services. They were the people who came to see us after Suri declared herself for internment at Manzanar. She should have volunteered herself at the army center months earlier, but”—he swallowed to stop his voice breaking—“I wouldn’t let her.”

There was another pause. I said nothing. How could I have been so stupid to think Jackson didn’t care? He was mad about Suri, and must have tried for months to stop her from going. I had never bothered asking her how she had evaded internment. They were taking in people, she told me herself, “with a drop of Japanese blood.” Jackson had doubtless pleaded with her not to go—but she had finally given in. He cared that she was there, and would give anything to get her out. If only I had listened to him—stupid, stupid!

“When the army found out she had evaded them, they were worried and arranged to send her to a center in Arkansas. Suri put in a request with the mayor that she be sent to Manzanar. The army got suspicious about her motivations and sent their ‘intelligence’ wing to question us both. They were okay, actually—two guys and a woman. They were civilians, but working for the government. It seems the world is full of spies these days. They took some convincing that Suri just wanted to help her in-laws and wasn’t part of an elaborate plan to overthrow the United States government.”

The sarcastic edge in his voice was no longer directed toward me. Perhaps he was just glad to be talking to somebody about it.

“You miss her,” I said. As soon as my words were spoken I realized how trite and insincere they sounded—after all I had put him through, now I was patronizing him.

He paused, perhaps in acknowledgment of my concern, and said, “I think the OSS is probably holding Stanislaw. I have the address and phone number of their office here, somewhere on a card. In the end they were quite helpful and said I could call them if there were any problems.”

“I guess this was not the kind of problem you were banking on,” I said, then added, “I’m sorry, Jackson.”

And I meant it. I was sorry.

“Stuff happens,” he said. “It’s a stupid world, and this is a stupid, stupid war.”

This was my fourth war. I was born in 1900 in an Ireland under British rule. My father was a civil servant and loyal to the British government—an unpopular stance. As a child I remember him commending the young men in our local village who joined the British Army to fight in World War One. They were driven to sign up by poverty more than loyalty—and if it was otherwise, they could never let on because their neighbors and friends were part of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, freedom fighters who opportunely took on our oppressors while their armies were occupied elsewhere. My third war was the worst war of them all: our Irish Civil War, when neighbors, friends and former comrades fought and killed one another on points of principle and policy. Although that is the case in all wars. My husband was a captain—a hero—but heroism is small comfort to those left behind at home. I knew how Jackson was feeling. His wife was away fighting her corner, but this was not his war, any more than it was mine.

“All war is stupid,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess it makes people do stupid things,” he said, and then added, “They wouldn’t be making such a fuss if I had let Suri volunteer herself when she was supposed to. This is partly my fault.”

He was probably right, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

“You know what, Jackson?” I said. “Don’t blame yourself. Blame this
all
on me. It’s the least I can do—I can take it.”

“Thanks,” he said, “I appreciate that.” Then he let out a little laugh and paused again as if he didn’t want to get off the phone.

“I miss her,” he said. “I hate being alone.”

My heart broke for him.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

It was too late to do anything about Stan that night.

Bridie had cooked a stew, but it didn’t look great. The edges of the pot were burned, and I noticed there was a substantial lump of it in the trash. Tom’s bowl was still on the table.

“Did you not eat your dinner, Tom?”

The child was a hog—it wasn’t like him to leave food uneaten.

“It’s rotten,” he said, “there’s sugar in it!”

“There is not!” the old woman exclaimed.

“How dare you speak about Bridie’s cooking like that,” I said, automatically tasting a spoonful from the pot. It
was
vile and sugary.

“Come along now, Tom, send your friend home. It’s time for bed.”

I clapped them both into action and said to Bridie, “It’s an easy mistake, Bridie—sure, I’m always putting salt in my tea. We need to get a proper sugar canister and not be using these glasses.” As I said it I noticed that the jar had the word “SUGAR” emblazoned across the front of it.

“I did not put sugar in that stew,” Bridie said. Her face was red and she looked furious, “and how
dare
you accuse me of such a thing.” Her lip was trembling. She was genuinely distraught. “If there is any sugar in that stew, well then, the little bastard must have put it there himself!”

The outburst was so unlike Bridie that I did not know what to make of it. I certainly could not be offended. The woman had a sharp tongue, but she had never,
ever
used language like that before—and against Tom? Whom she adored? There must be something else wrong.

“Is everything all right, Bridie? Is there something wrong?”

She looked at me for a moment, her eyes moist and blinking. Such vulnerability suddenly, all anger and feistiness gone—it wasn’t like her at all. Goodness me, she looked so old. Then suddenly she was back.

“I’m going to bed, and to hell with the lot of you.”

She’d be fine, I decided. It had been a long day for all of us. I gathered up the boys and made them put their pajamas on, even Freddie and Leo, then made them all bowls of hot milk with sugar sandwiches melted into them. As they ate, I watched them and allowed myself to feel warm and motherly after my cruel day.

Despite the sweet interlude and pulling Tom into the bed beside me for comfort, I did not sleep a wink. Every time I closed my eyes I would see the anger and disgust in Suri’s eyes, and think of my poor friend Stan imprisoned in some cold army barracks overnight.

The following morning I called the Office of Strategic Services right away and got through to the contact that Jackson had given me.

“We let him go last night,” he said. “Matter of fact, the operatives who drove him home came in with bad heads this morning. Seems they went out for dinner first and got caught up with some Hollywood types. Gotta say, your friend knows some good people.”

Clearly I wasn’t one of them.

I telephoned Stan’s house and, when I didn’t get a reply, got straight in the car and drove up there, briefly shouting at Bridie through her bedroom door to let her know that I was going out. I was surprised to find that she wasn’t already in the kitchen, but then I thought, as last night had proven, Bridie was getting old and sometimes forgetful, and in fairness I was glad to let her rest.

I pulled up the truck outside Stan’s house and banged on the door. I was relieved that he had been released, and it certainly didn’t sound as if he had come to any harm, but all the same I wouldn’t be happy until I had seen with my own eyes that he was all right.

I banged and called through the door, “Stan, are you okay? Is everything all right? It’s me . . .”

The door opened abruptly and Stan was standing there, dressed, if unshaven and a little tired-looking.

“Oh, thank God! Thank God you’re all right.”

I fell on him and wrapped my arms around him.

He didn’t respond, but stiffened and said, “I was about to make coffee.” Then he moved away and gestured to me to follow him to the kitchen. Gentle, polite—but cold.

I was embarrassed by my sudden and, as it seemed, inappropriate show of affection.

“How did you get out?” I asked, following him into the kitchen.

“I have a friend, Seymour, he’s a writer who, believe it or not, is in the OSS. In Europe. His father, Schulberg, is head of Paramount; he had a novel out last year—I was at the party in New York—nice guy. Anyway, he told me he was going to Europe and I gave him a few people to look up. Turns out he was going over there to make movies for the government, documentary films and suchlike. He was going to work on a unit with John Ford. I know him—and they asked me to compose some music for the films, something sympathetic to the scenes they were filming. I told the guys who picked me up that it had been my pleasure to work on their department’s films—and they checked me out, then let me go. That’s Hollywood. Nothing bad can happen when you work in the movies. If I had been just a Jew with a foreign accent teaching music, who knows?”