Blood Sisters Read online

  Hank hasn’t come in by noon. Sandwiches and Cokes teeter on a tray on the porch; Patsy, chewing on a turkey sandwich, takes a good look at me, and raises her eyebrows. “Can we make some coffee?” When we are in the kitchen, she asks, “Trouble?”

  12

  Patsy sees no bruises, only red eyelids and a trembling hand as it pours their coffee. Outside, Jimmy seems to be napping in a deck chair after his early rising. Time to talk. “What’s happened, Eleanor?”

  “Hank’s disappeared, at least for a night. He’s losing his job, along with the rest of the plant.” Eleanor pauses, puts down her cup. “I’m worried about the job, of course, but I’m even more worried about Hank’s reaction. Normally, he would be furious, yelling, blaming me, breaking things at this kind of news. But he went silent, sat for a long time, and then left. Said he might be back.” She dabs at her eyes with a paper napkin. “What is he going to do?”

  Patsy doesn’t want to speculate but she has seen this sort of reaction when an anxious veteran is hit with something he cannot handle. The anger turns into depression. It is serious. They need to try to find Hank and get him some help if the veterans hospital still offers it. It must. Many Korean vets and recent Vietnam survivors have come back in bad shape. Doctors once called it combat fatigue; before that, in World War I, it had been shell shock. This old phenomenon has recently been given a new name: post-traumatic stress disorder. Its symptoms affect not only the veteran but also everyone in his life. Patsy knows this as a social worker and, more importantly, as a vet’s wife. “Where do you think he’d go, for quiet or for safety or in desperation?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been married to him for more than twenty years, and I don’t know.”

  “A friend? Is there someone he has mentioned or sees sometimes? Someone from church? A buddy from long ago?”

  “I don’t think so. Well…when he first came back from Korea, he wrote a few letters to a friend who served with him. But he hasn’t done that for years.” Eleanor opens a drawer and pages through a tattered notebook. “Ralph, I think…yes, Ralph Engels. He used to live in California. I don’t know where he lives now.” She opens a telephone company directory. “No Ralph Engels in this town. That would have been too easy.” Eleanor sets the phone back in its cradle.

  “Let me try the old California number. Can’t hurt.” Patsy finds Ralph Engels’s name in the old notebook and dials.

  The woman who answers the phone does not know a Ralph Engels.

  “Wait. Would you please look in your local directory for that name? Maybe he’s moved. It’s important.”

  Patsy hears pages turn. “Yes, here he is,” the woman says and begins reading the number.

  Patsy, her hand shaking, writes down the number. As she hangs up, she moans, “Shit. Hank can’t have gotten to California overnight,” but she calls the number anyway, punches the speakerphone button and hands the phone to Eleanor.

  “That’s my father,” a teenaged voice tells Eleanor, in response to her request to speak with Ralph. “Why do you need him?”

  “When your father was in Korea, so was my husband, Hank Ellison. Hank is…sick, and we felt that an old friend might make him feel better. Can I speak with Ralph?”

  The boy hesitates. Is he debating whether she’s telling the truth? “Dad is in a veterans hospital in Portland. He’s been there a while. If he’s with your husband, they’re there.”

  When the call ends, Eleanor breathes deeply. They have a clue, and Patsy, who knows her way around that facility from her days of working there, agrees to go with her. First, they have to check on Jimmy, tell him he can stop clipping and begin cleaning up the debris he’s accumulated.

  “Thank God,” he sighs. “I thought you’d never come.”

  “Jimmy, I’ve never heard you say that before, about God.”

  “Learned it from Janey.” He picks up the rake and begins.

  * * *

  Eleanor is glad Patsy is driving. The hospital is in the hills on the west side of the city and this road would be dangerous if she were at the wheel, her breath coming in gasps and her hands twitching in her lap. “I’m glad Jimmy didn’t ask where we were going. He doesn’t know that Hank didn’t come home last night.”

  “Good. He seems okay with finishing the cleanup job. Better than okay. He is a hard worker, and he likes using tools and feeling helpful. He’s a good kid.”

  Eleanor shrieks as a yellow sports car honks and speeds around them and Patsy brakes to avoid a collision.

  Patsy glances at her shaken friend. “Only a few minutes to go. Breathe in through your nose and exhale from your mouth, five times.”

  “Is that what you advise panic-stricken clients to do?”

  “Just do it. It’ll ease your mind. Works for me every time. My mother taught me whooshing when I was a rattled teenager taking the college entrance test for the first time. Sometimes we do it in unison. And see, here we are, all safe and sound.” Patsy pulls the key out and begins to open the car door.

  “Wait a minute. I’m still whooshing.”

  * * *

  The women check in at a reception desk and are sent to a fourth-floor room, which they find occupied by a gray-haired man in a wheelchair watching something on TV.

  “Ralph?”

  They startle him; he turns down the volume and shakes his head. “That’s his bed, but he’s down in the day room, I think. He doesn’t like my soap operas.” He waves his hand in the direction of the hallway. “Down there in the day room.”

  The chairs in the day room are mostly occupied; some of the men seem to be sleeping, while others chat or play cards under the low murmur of voices. An aide carrying magazines directs them to a bearded man in dark-framed glasses reading a book. He smiles when they introduce themselves as Hank’s wife and her friend. Does he remember Hank? They explain that Hank didn’t come home last night and they are worried about him. “Well, I saw him this morning. He was kind of messed up—crying and stuff—so we just talked a little and remembered what we could of Korea, the good times at least. I wrote him a note last month when I came up here for treatment, and I was glad to see him.” Ralph Engels pauses, shakes his head. “He might be ready for this place too. I told him so.”

  “I’m so glad you saw him. Treatment? Like yours?” Patsy has noticed Ralph’s name on a schedule posted near him. Ralph evidently meets with a group three times a week.

  “Yeah. I’ve been dealing with the war for years but didn’t know what to do about it. Now that the ’Nam vets are back, the VA is paying more attention. Quite a few guys are getting medication and counseling in this wing of the hospital. I have one week to go until I’m on my own. I hope Hank’s still around. I think we’ll need each other.”

  “He didn’t say where he was going, did he?”

  “Only that he was going for a long walk back to his house; maybe think about looking for a job.”

  Eleanor tears a page from a notebook in her purse. “Ralph, here’s our phone number. We’ll get together when you are released. And good luck, friend.” As she hugs him, Patsy hears her whisper, “Thank you.”

  When they are in the car, Eleanor asks Patsy to hurry. “Maybe he’s home by now. Do you think?”

  Patsy doesn’t think so, and she won’t encourage her friend with false hope. Yet when she pulls the car into Eleanor’s driveway, she grins and calls, “Welcome back,” to the tall figure on the porch as he fumbles with his keys.

  Hope, carrying a large pepperoni pizza.

  13

  We decide to take what’s left of the day off. We pretend that today didn’t happen, that we, even the tired walker, are willing to start anew in the morning. Hank shuffles through the newspaper as I mix a salad. Jimmy whispers he will finish the high places and we clippers can work on the lower stretch tomorrow. My son seems pleased to be helpful; perhaps he’s responding to his fellow workers’ gratitude and compliments. Or, maybe, to the unusual peace in our house.

  The three of us laugh o
ver the pizza Hank has brought, we go to bed early, and then the next morning, Jimmy presents us with nearly perfect pancakes for breakfast. This is how some families feel most of the time, I think, as I clear the table and Hank reads the rest of the neglected Sunday paper until it falls to his lap and his eyes close. He says he will relax, not go to work. Jimmy and I, in a hushed conversation, agree to not tell Hank about the hedge project until it is finished. We won’t upset him with unimportant things today.

  As Hank naps in the overstuffed armchair, I sort through his old service papers and don’t find much about medical care, especially the kind of care Hank apparently needs. I decide I’ll call the VA today, make an appointment for the two of us to find out what he must do to be involved in the program Ralph is in. If he wants to do it. I have to be careful to make sure he is ready. But what better time? Without a job, he’ll have time to talk to people, visit doctors, do whatever the treatment asks for. Tomorrow will be the beginning of something better for each of us. I steal my own secret addiction from the papers on Hank’s lap—the comics—and curl up on the sofa.

  I am trying to figure out what’s funny about Dagwood when the phone rings. I hurry to the kitchen to answer the phone there so that Hank won’t wake up. Something, a premonition, slows my hand as I pick up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Glad I finally caught you. I’ve been trying for more than a week. Thought you were trying to avoid me.”

  Lloyd. I hang up, then lift the receiver so that the phone will give a busy signal if he tries again. I go to the fridge where we keep the vodka, pour a glassful, and carry it to the porch. I settle into the same wicker chair that Hank had hunkered in two evenings ago. I bring the drink to my lips and feel the thrill of the alcohol making its way down my throat, the promise of it. I sip again, set the glass on the table at my side, and wonder how I have arrived at this terrible place.

  In 1951, Hank, in a belated surge of patriotism or maybe testosterone, came home to me, his new wife, one evening and announced that he had joined the Army. He had quit his construction job that afternoon and, along with a buddy, walked into the induction office and declared himself ready to defend his country against the North Koreans and the Chinese. Besides, he added, as I felt my face stiffen, he hated being on the cleanup crew of a postwar mall project that paid nothing and had him washing floors and scraping up paint drips. He was twenty-four, and the Army was promising a future that didn’t involve sweeping up drywall dust and cleaning concrete floors.

  He had abandoned me. We had been married less than a year.

  Before he shipped out, Hank made sure I’d get a check from the Army, and since I was already working as a salesperson at a clothing store, he assured me I’d be okay. “I’ll be back in a year or two,” he promised, “and life will be good.” He did come back, in a little more than a year, trained in the useless skill of artillery, with a painful, embarrassing wound in his buttocks. One good thing about it, he bragged, was that he could still get it up.

  I, during the year he was gone, had begun to believe I wasn’t really married, that the life I’d imagined—four kids, a ranch-type house, all the things that the fifties promised, including the idea that I wouldn’t have to care about what was happening anywhere but in my own kitchen, in my own bedroom, in my circle of canasta friends and tennis team—had been a mirage.

  I was twenty-three, my family was a thousand miles away, and I was lonely. I hadn’t anticipated the loneliness.

  I hadn’t anticipated Lloyd Jensen either. One night my tennis team stopped at a tavern, the local spot that served hamburgers and beer, to celebrate a loss to our strongest opponents. “But we fought to the end,” Sally had shouted over her mug of beer, and the team cheered, and the guys at the bar cheered too and bought us another round. A man with broad shoulders under a smart leather jacket and blue eyes that captured mine sidled in between stools and smiled at me. “I bet you were the leader of the team.”

  “Actually,” I answered, “I got a huge cramp in my calf and had to call off my game. I can still feel it.”

  “Because you are a fighter,” he said. “I like fighters.”

  I had never been called a fighter before.

  By the time most of the other players had left, I was still on the stool talking to Lloyd. He understood, he said, how I must be feeling about the husband who’d left me. He’d been there. “My lover died. I’m still feeling angry and empty a year later, even though I can’t blame her for leaving.”

  From then on, I answered his calls. I met him at local bars until our feelings became more intense and I’d show up at his apartment, the size of a large closet. The bed was immaculate, clean, carefully made. Everything about Lloyd was immaculate, perfect, even his debonair mustache.

  I knew I wasn’t in love. I was in loneliness. Lloyd filled in my empty spaces.

  For five months. Then Hank wrote that he would be coming home, injured but mostly okay; he was being discharged.

  Lloyd left with characteristically immaculate words. “You have been special. I thank you. You made my life whole, or as whole as it will ever be.” We kissed, laid heads on shoulders, and I closed Lloyd’s door forever. In the following weeks, I began to suspect that saying goodbye to a sad woman might have been familiar territory for this organized, cool man. He did it so well. Perhaps he didn’t live in that closet; maybe he only made love in it. That thought stopped my tears for a while, but one day I walked by his apartment. Not to see him. Not for sex. For something else I could not admit even to myself. When I knocked on his door, a curly-haired guy I recognized from one of the bars we went to, Larry something, opened it. “Oh God,” he laughed. “Not another one.” He remembered my name, too, and he invited me into that familiar room. Over a glass of beer, he told me that I was lucky to be done with Lloyd. Lloyd, he explained, was a serial philanderer. “A sex addict, if there is such a thing,” Larry said, looking into his beer instead of at me. Lloyd brought his women to Larry’s apartment, paying Larry for the nights he used it. “A nice little income. Still going on, you know. He’s also a prodigious liar. Just ask his wife who is apparently in the dark about his need to be at work at weird hours. Three kids, you know. Or you don’t. Don’t suppose he talks about them or her.”

  I left the closet, crying.

  Yes, I was lucky to be done with him. Except I wasn’t.

  A month later, when Hank walked off the boat and into my arms, I had begun crying again. Hank thought it was because he had come home, but it was because I knew I was pregnant.

  When Jimmy was born—prematurely, I told my friends and husband—we were warned that he might have some complications. He was, weight-wise, beyond the normal range for a preemie, but the cord had been wrapped around his neck. His skin was blue, but he cried enthusiastically. That was good. Hank and I had a son, a start on the dream I’d resurrected: four children, ranch-type house, cookies in the oven, a garden when I found time to work in it.

  Hank’s dream to move beyond washing windows became reality. He’d discovered in the Army that he was good with his hands. He got a job as a machinist at the aluminum factory and liked it. We lived for three years with his parents, who helped with Jimmy while I resumed my job at Lerner’s so that we could save for a house of our own.

  As a little boy, Jimmy really liked Legos. He would play with them all day, and once he had built something, he destroyed it and began again. His grandparents read to him, as I did in the evenings, and he would try to pay attention, but his eyes always searched for the Legos. He didn’t seem fearful, but he had an odd way of avoiding other people’s eyes, looking down or off when he was being talked to, and when asked a question, he didn’t seem to hear it.

  Yet the hearing test indicated that his ears were okay. He just didn’t want to answer questions, to ask questions, in fact, to communicate with anyone, even us, although we sometimes caught him smiling or glancing at us. “He’ll talk when he wants to,” I told Hank.

  “We’re too old for this,” H
ank’s parents finally admitted after a meal in which their grandchild had left the table mid-meal to sit on the floor in the next room, rearranging a tower of Legos. “This is not normal, Hank. He needs help. We’re too old to keep worrying about him.”

  Hank and I moved to a subdivision full of new houses hoping to discover that getting away from worried grandparents would help quiet our own concerns about their grandson. It didn’t.

  As Jimmy grew older, the problem, really, became Hank. His impatience with the boy grew also. At the table, at Jimmy’s bedside, when he walked in from work, he badgered his son, as if he could somehow shout or argue Jimmy into changing. “Talk, damn it. You understand us, the books we read to you, but you refuse to talk to us. Why?” Jimmy would turn away, back to the Legos.

  When I attempted to intervene, Hank, angry, told me to stop babying him. “He’s almost four, for God’s sake.” I began to wonder whether Hank had always been an angry person, and whether I had just never noticed his bullying until he came back from the war. How could a small, silent child cause such outrage?

  By the time Jimmy was five, our pediatrician advised us to look into a specialized private kindergarten. He also gave us a list of behavioral experts and sent us the reports on the increasing cases of what some doctors were calling Asperger’s.

  But Hank said dismissively, “We can’t afford a special school,” and Jimmy remained a silent child, carrying his Legos in a bag to his morning kindergarten class. His teacher said he was delayed, she thought, but a little time would make a difference in his speech. Once in a while, he cried or struck out at us or a classmate when he couldn’t say what he wanted to say. His arms flapped sometimes when he got agitated, and Hank would tell him to settle down, but Jimmy seemed unable to do so, even when we held his arms and hands and tried to soothe him.