Jane Smiley - Some Luck

“Claire should be home from school anytime now. Henry and Lillian come later.”

“I’m sure they’re very busy.”

A lull settled over the conversation. Both of them took a sip of tea.

Finally, Hildy trilled, “So — what have you heard from Frank lately?”

Rosanna looked at her straight on. “Nothing.”

Hildy’s smile brightened, then wobbled, then faded. Rosanna said, “How about you?”

Hildy said, “It’s been a while, I must say. I was getting a bit worried.”

“My brother didn’t write his wife for nine months after he went over.”

“I know he’s in …” She hesitated the barest moment then said, “France.” But, then, everyone was in France. Rosanna said, “Sometimes he writes to a girl who lives nearby. He’s known her since grammar school. She showed me a letter that said he got to the Rhine, and there was no one there, but Eisenhower wouldn’t let them go across. Very strange. That was November.” Minnie had gotten this letter, the most recent one. Rosanna pretended that she wasn’t watching Hildy very carefully. But Hildy wasn’t much of an actress. She sighed, and her face fell. Rosanna softened her voice. “When was the last time you heard from Frankie?”

Rosanna expected the girl to say, “Last summer,” but she said, “I never have.”

“Are you really his fiancée?”

Hildy stared at Rosanna for a moment, then burst into tears. “But I should be!” she said. “I was going to be! If he hadn’t left so suddenly, I would be. We were getting along beautifully. He told me everything.”

Rosanna took a sip of tea, then set the cup and saucer on the table. She said, “With Frankie, that might be a reason that you would never be his fiancée.”

“Why? Why would that be?” Her voice rose. Clearly this was a thought she had had herself.

“Look, Hildy. I’m not saying that I understand Frankie, or ever have. He’s not like anyone in our family that we know of. But I do know that if you expect him to do something and he senses your expectation, that’s enough to make him not do it.”

Hildy had taken off one of her gloves, and now she started twisting it between her hands. Rosanna reached for it, took it, and smoothed it on the table. Hildy, whose crying had subsided, started again. When was the last time Rosanna had seen any of her children cry? Joey, maybe, about some animal’s death. But that had been years ago by this point. No one cried at Rolf’s funeral or Oma’s funeral. Rosanna said, “You’re a beautiful girl, Hildy. You need to find someone else.”

Hildy shook her head. “I tried. And one of them did ask me to marry him, but I couldn’t. I can’t forget Frank.”

“What does your mother say?”

“She doesn’t know. Frank would never come to Decorah to meet anyone.”

“There you go,” said Rosanna.

“I can’t do it,” said Hildy.

The one who broke the spell was Claire, who slammed through the front door, saying, “Whose car is that? Hi! Who are you?”

This girl, Hildy, reassembled herself in about two seconds, so quickly that Rosanna would have bet that Claire had no idea of the scene that she had intruded upon. Hildy smiled, reached forward, picked up and slipped on the glove Rosanna had laid on the table. She said, “That’s my car. I’m Hildy Bergstrom. I knew your brother in college, and I was passing by. Are you Claire?”

Claire nodded.

“Well, I need to leave if I want to get to Albert Lea at a decent hour.” She stood up and put on her coat. Truly, her surface was perfect, thought Rosanna. Her makeup was hardly smudged, which meant that it wasn’t makeup — the beauty belonged to her. From a pure breeding standpoint, Rosanna thought, the two specimens of livestock known as Frank and Hildy would certainly produce champions, wouldn’t they?

She took Hildy to the door, and Claire walked her to her car. She came back with a box of fudge and said, “She was nice.”

“She was,” said Rosanna.

ALL THROUGH GERMANY, Ruben made himself a little business, and Frank didn’t stop him. In every town and village that they passed through, Ruben went into houses and shops and stole things. It wasn’t hard — the Jerries ran off when they saw the Americans coming, and they didn’t always lock up behind themselves. Even when they did, Ruben smashed a window or kicked open a door. If there was someone cowering inside, Ruben banished her from the house, then went through the things. Sometimes there was jewelry, but Ruben was more interested in lace and figurines, fancy letter openers, music boxes, ornate picture frames, silver hairbrushes and hand mirrors. He took one or two items every day. What was astonishing to Frank was that the houses did have doors — and windowpanes and roofs and nice things. That Ruben should export some of these nice items to a shop his cousin had in Cape May, New Jersey, was okay with Frank. What Frank saw that he wished he could export was that gunpowder the Germans used — smokeless and entirely unrevealing of the shooter’s position. Or those machine guns they had, which fired so quickly that they made one long buzzing sound instead of series of pops, like American weapons. The tanks. The 88s. The Bouncing Betties. The Teller mines. The Russians had more manpower and the Americans had more money, but the Germans had know-how that Professor Cullhane could only dream of.

The slave camp they stumbled across was called Kaufering. All the slaves, who looked barely alive, were bundled into huts dug out of the ground and roofed over. The men (or boys) were like skeletons draped with rags — Frank had never seen anything like them, even in France, even in Italy. It was hard to decide which was more horrifying: the long pile of tormented corpses laid out on the ground, their sticklike arms and legs askew, and their heads angled back as if they were still screaming in pain, or the not-yet-dead, who looked just the same but were still standing (barely) and breathing. They had been employed, apparently, in building airplanes or rockets, but how they could even lift their tools Frank could not understand. Another unit, Frank heard, had come across some of these people being driven by their Jerry captors deeper into Germany. This seemed to be the last thing the Germans wanted to do, the thing they cared most about — shooting their slaves. The slaves were Jewish. Like Julius. Like Rosa. It made Frank feel frozen and horror-struck in a way he had not felt on the battlefield.

They had a look at Hitler’s summer residence, the Berghof. Though most of it had been bombed to pieces before they got there, there was plenty to look at, and both the place where Hitler was said to have had tea every day, and another place, higher up, were intact. Ruben made himself busy finding things in the garden, and he did get two items — a spoon that he found under a bush, and a button. He told everyone it was Hitler’s own button, the one that popped off his fly when he was pissing himself in fear. But Frank pointed out that Hitler hadn’t been there since the previous July. Ruben said, “He knew we were coming.” These souvenirs he intended to keep, “unless I get a good offer.”

Around the time they got to Berchtesgaden, they began hearing rumors about the Russians — that Ike didn’t want to confront the Russians, that the Russians were taking Berlin, that the Russians were coming in hordes from the east and overrunning everything, that the Russians could not be stopped, that their own units had been ordered to meet up with the Fifth Army, which had been making its way up through Italy, so that in case the Russians showed up there would be plenty of them to fight the Russians back to Germany or Czechoslovakia or wherever. There were so many Russians that they could get all the way to western France — this was why no one was being sent home, or even to the Pacific. The next war could easily begin.