Photograph

Chapter One MADDY I've decided I'm not a good Catholic because I'll never forgive the Japanese for ruining my seventeenth birthday. It was December 7, 1941the day they bombed Pearl Harbor. The day that President Roosevelt proclaimed would forever live in "infamy" for every red-blooded American. That kind of sentiment didn't leave much anticipation or appetite for birthday cake, or for forgiveness. It was enough to make a girl good'n mad. We were at war. I suppose I should have counted my blessings that seventeen years earlier, Mother didn't have the imagination to christen me Pearl. She chose biblical names instead; David for my older brother, and Madelyn for me. I've always gone by Maddy. As for my birthday cake, I did have oneon Monday instead of Sunday. But Mother cried the whole time she mixed the batter and poured it in the pans. The layers rose lopsided, and I swear I could taste a slight saltiness. Maybe it was just the metallic taste of fear. My brother Davey had joined the Marine reserves back in June, and now that we were officially at war, we all knew what that meant. He'd be one of the first to go. The bad news didn't end there. At my halfhearted, one-day-late birthday dinner, my boyfriend, Lyle, announced that he had joined the Navy. To say this was a shock to me would be like saying the world had stopped spinning at 8:05 p.m. and would continue once more when this whole war thing was settled. Lyle and I were "almost" engaged. He'd even kissed me in the back row of the movie theater during the newsreel before It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. I'll never forget it because that very night we'd secretly promised to marry as soon as he had a good job and could earn my mother's permission. And now he'd gone and joined the war without even telling me first. Then, to announce it in front of the whole familymy mother, Davey, and his wife, Ruthon a night that should have been my celebration, like he'd just grown a foot taller and we should be proud, added salt to the wound. I'd had little experience with wounds in 1941. By the following year when my eighteenth birthday rolled around, however, I was a good bit more uncomfortably acquainted. What I didn't understand then and do now is, wounds are like ghoststhe initial pain might cut you to the ground, but if you can get up, sometimes with the help of others, you can survive and go on. Even as the phantoms follow in your wake. My brother Davey got his orders a week before Christmas 1941. He was to pack enough clothes for three days, then report immediately to a place called Parris Island, South Carolina, for training. After that, he'd ship out to parts unknown. My mother was inconsolable. I hadn't seen her cry so much since we'd lost my father to a heart ailment (what he'd called his "bum ticker") when I was ten. Life in general, and my mother in particular, had never been the same after that. She'd seemed to decide that she had to take control of every detail in our world in order to make things safe. It was enough to make a girl, a headstrong girl like me, anyway, want to scream. Unable to bear the thought of Davey traveling halfway around the planet to go to war, I suppose, Mother concentrated on South Carolina and how far her son would be from Pennsylvania and home. Ruth, Davey's wife, who had as much, or more, reason as Mother to weep, held herself together admirably. I'd never considered that being a wife and having babies could be a risky undertaking, but maybe Mother wasEllis, Virginia is the author of 'Photograph', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345466198 and ISBN 0345466195.