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Jane Augustine

War and Peace: The American Forties

The air-raid siren blew --like nothing we had ever heard before. 

I was only a little girl, age ten, a few nights after December 7, 1941, but I knew it was war. I stood looking out of the big front-view window of our darkened house in the Berkeley hills. Quickly the city lights below went out, leaving only the graceful parabolic lightbulb chains that outlined the Mare Island Shipyards of north San Francisco Bay operating night and day.  These lights stayed on, long and long, outlining those vast vacancies that were the spaces at which the Japanese pilots would aim -- for how could they not?  Weren’t they telling us that they were coming for us when they attacked our naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7?  But as a nation we were angry and were fighting back, so the Japanese didn’t follow through.  Not this time.  Luckily.  But the next time?  Who knew?

Events moved swiftly for my mother and father, known as Midge and Augie. They were serious, intelligent and pleasure-loving transplants to California.  Augie loved music, played the piano, guitar, banjo, mandolin, xylophone, parlor organ and a junior portable organ with leather bellows that he worked by his feet and strapped up to carry to parties. He had a beautiful tenor-baritone singing voice. His musical pals, the brothers Lee and Ralph Lykins, conducted a dance band that played at the Claremont Hotel overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland, where my parents often went dancing. Midge owned seven evening gowns. We were terribly proud of my father.  He was above all an American; he had proven it by joining the U.S. Army only a few days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He was the third child of mid-nineteenth-century emigrants from Germany to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where his father had been minister of St. John’s Lutheran church for forty years, preaching only in German until World War One. My father did not speak English until he went to school at age six. I mentioned this fact one day, and he turned pale: “Don’t ever tell anyone that anyone in this house knows or speaks German!” I didn’t understand.  His skills in German as well as his legal skills were what the U.S. Army valued. He had got a leave of absence from his job as Deputy Attorney General of the State of California—that was unusual, a good sign, since the Depression years were still close.

A cut in income to save one’s country—that was admirable, but we had an additional if unmentionable problem: my brother six younger than I. He wouldn’t eat, except for pabulum in warm milk served in the insulated baby bowl from which he was fed at six months.  He was now four years old. My mother asked for help from a gentle elderly woman psychoanalyst, Dr. Jaffa, who had escaped Vienna after World War One. She advised my mother to keep to her ambition to get a master’s degree in public health while working as a writer in California’s State Department of Public Health. My brother could stay in boarding school during the week so she could realize this goal. I could take care of myself in public school and the public library after school hours. This doctor and my parents must have believed what is true: it doesn’t matter what foods one likes or doesn’t like, and everyone eventually eats. Did my brother eat at school? Who knew? Maybe he only ate pabulum at home on weekends. He was well into adulthood before he told anyone how he had been beaten at that school for not making his bed properly. Anyway, there was no time now to deal with his problem, or non-problem. It was war.

Matters were not helped by my father’s nineteenth-century, rather Teutonic views of money. Money was bad. It was low-minded to act in order to get money, but it was also bad not to have it. Americans are supposed to be rich, but his father, our grandfather, who had died earlier in 1941, was a Lutheran minister in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Ministers were the exception. My father told us of the year when he was still a small child, and his father told them he had finally earned a thousand dollars cash. Usually his farmer parishioners brought him a dozen eggs, a slab of bacon, or a chicken.  The world was changing.

Now that father was dead, and the son, a lawyer 42 years old, on leave from his job, was soon to be sent overseas. Army officers also had to buy their own uniforms, which, like all middle-class men’s clothing, were tailor-made. More money we didn’t have. Dark khaki for an officer’s winter blouse, tan khaki for summer, tan cotton shirts, underwear, a specified number of garments, few options. Official photos were taken; the captain’s two stars gleamed gold on his epaulettes. He spent several months in 1942 at Camp San Luis Obispo teaching conversational German to other officers educated in law, as he was; they were to be the Control Commission governing Germany after Hitler’s defeat. Early in 1943 they were sent as a group to Fort Bragg and then overseas to an unspecified city in England we figured out from my father’s letters had to be Manchester. (“Hurry up and drink your beer before it gets cold.”) My mother and my father wrote each other every day; many pages of these letters were mutilated by the censor’s boxes cut out of them.

 I wrote him too, but not so often. I didn’t know what to say.  I was growing up and found growing-up processes extremely interesting, but learned they were best not discussed. I wrote my father about liking a boy named Bob Brilliant, but only ridicule, if rather mild, fell back on me.  Weren’t girls expected to like boys?  I decided to shut up.  My height rose to almost 5’6”, and my skin went bad. I picked and picked at the red spots, but they wouldn’t flatten; they only got larger and more conspicuous, and I had trouble learning not to pick. No talking about that to my father. I went with my sixth-grade classmates from Cragmont School down Marin Avenue to seventh grade at Garfield Junior High School—now Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School on the flats off Grove Street. It was a much bigger place, and I was just beginning to make friends with Ellen Takahashi when she disappeared.

  Money still being a problem, my mother rented out two of our four bedrooms to “war wives,” Nancy Adams and Elinor Williams, women who had left their homes to be near husbands stationed at nearby west-coast military bases. My mother was close to Nancy, who was nice-looking but had poor eyesight; she wore heavy eye-glasses and had no breasts, just simply very small glands, as with men. My own breasts were growing and were sort of a problem. My mother was less close to Elinor. It seemed that in my mother’s view she was “cheap,” but she was pretty with curly brown hair. She gave me a bright-red fitted velveteen dress with a heart-shaped neckline trimmed in white lace which I adored, but very soon it was too tight in the bust for me. Besides, it seemed from over-frizzy permanent waves that I would never have decent curls. Besides, it was a dress for a young woman to wear when going out with a young man, but there were no young men, only boys.    

In Manchester my father got food poisoning. Evidently a cream pie had been left out too long by untrained American personnel. Others got sick too.  He was dangerously ill and thought he would die, but slowly over several weeks he got well.  It was fortunate that my mother did not know of this fearful situation until after the crisis was over. On Christmas leave in 1943 my father was able to go to Cairo and from there send home gifts. To my mother he sent a wide silver filigree bracelet studded with turquoise and coral, and for me a pair of heavy silver “slave bracelets,” as the style was called.  Back in England in 1943 my father renewed work with the Control Commission until the U.S. invaded Europe on June 6, 1944. Two days later the Control Commission following the American troops set up headquarters near Remagen Bridge in Germany.  In April 1945 Germany formally surrendered, and my father came home.

My mother drove our Nash, with my brother and me in the back seat, to pick him up at the railroad station in Berkeley.  They embraced. Or so now memory tells me.  I know how much that reunion meant to them both. My father had a bag that went into the car trunk. My mother got back into the car on the passenger side so my father could drive. He got in. I don’t remember being embraced, but I understood how much his love for my mother took priority.  He was silent as we were driving.  Then, looking at me in the rear-view mirror, he said, “What’s the matter with your face?”  My mother quickly said, “Oh, Augie, it’s just a pimple,” but she was too late.  I understood what he saw: he had left behind a nice brownish little girl -- who knew how she would look?  He came back to find an awkward brownish teenager, a woman-in-the-making whose looks disappointed him. He had wanted a duplicate of his wife with her near-black hair and white skin touched by a faint pink blush.  His hopes were dashed.

**

But life went on. They went back to work fixing up Stonehouse, as they now called the abandoned schoolhouse on Redwood Road. My mother took me to a skin doctor; my complexion improved; my grades continued to be good. My brother had not changed or improved. After ten years of outrageous medical mistakes made by a psychiatrist addicted to Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mother” theory, despite the entire lack of evidence, a kind if bewildered psychologist advised my parents to send my brother to public school and let him manage. He was normal, just a bit odd.

On weekends we went to Stonehouse. The roof had holes in it, and bats, and it had to be replaced with a long sloping roof that spread over an open porch. A large square was cut into it it to accommodate an oak tree. My father put up a ladder to look down into a hollow in the tree. There he saw three baby owls.  I climbed up and looked too. I was thrilled. My father made up a rhyme, imitating one we knew from the first volume of My Book House, which my mother used to read to us when we couldn’t read for ourselves:

Over by the meadow in an old oak tree

lived a mother owl and her little owlets three.

“Hoot!” said the mother. “We can’t!” said the three,

and they didn’t give a hoot in the old hollow tree.

In those long-gone days at Stonehouse when the roof had cedar shakes and a thick lawn covered the space that is now asphalt pavement, my father would stand under the clock in the Stonehouse living-room, drink in hand, waiting for the hour-hand to reach twelve noon. I remember him smiling, declaring “You must not take a drink until the sun is over the yard-arm.”  I had an inkling of how he had gotten through the war, and his smile was the definition of peace.