Walking down the side streets, all he hears are his own footsteps and the howl of an alley cat. Polish people go to bed early, get up early, work hard. His sister’s house is an 1893 worker’s cottage with a peaked roof, small and modest. Its location in Wicker Park is its asset. Her husband, Mack, often bends an elbow at the corner bar, Szczęście. The kids go to Burr School. Peggy can walk to St. Mary of the Angels near where their parents once lived in twenty minutes. She doesn’t miss a morning. She used to say, “Come with me, Charlie. You know. Say a few prayers.” But as one of the guys struggling to survive with him in Mitsushima used to say, “God and me ain’t pals no more.”
The house looks dark now; they must have all gone to bed. Charlie’s apartment is Peggy’s converted cellar, with its own door to the outside. Stone outer walls. A curtain separates his bed from the so-called living room. A makeshift john raised up a step and a shower with a drain in the floor. No kitchen. If he got home in time, he’d eat upstairs with Peggy and her family. He can’t remember the last time that happened. The first of every month, he stuffs twenty dollars into the jar on her kitchen counter, his share of the cost of food he never eats.
After changing into chinos and a sweatshirt, he climbs the steps to the kitchen hoping to grab a Hamm’s from Peg’s icebox. He always feels exhausted these days but still finds it hard to sleep. Sometimes beer helps. Sometimes nothing helps.
He’s startled to find Peggy sitting at the kitchen table.
“Oh, sorry,” he says. “Didn’t know you were up.”
“It’s your kitchen too.” She points to a bowl of fruit. “Want a peach?” She’s already bitten into one and is wiping the juice from her chin. He notes her golden brown hair is yanked tightly around prickly, netted curlers. Why do girls do painful things like sleep on rollers? Peggy’s hair is always perfect. Her clothes are immaculately ironed, her shoes polished.
“What I really need is a beer.”
“I wish you’d eat something.”
“What’d you make for dinner?”
“Stuffed cabbage. It was good.”
“I bet it was.”
He opens the icebox, filled with glass bowls of leftovers. He sees the stuffed cabbages, fat babies snuggled in a row. A single cabbage roll per man might have helped protect him and his friends from beriberi during the war. Now it’s just one choice among many. The rolls will be eaten the day after tomorrow. Peggy runs a neat, frugal household. She learned it all from their mother, who never wasted a grape in her life. He finds a Hamm’s and pops off its top on the bottle capper attached to the wall. Charlie pulls out a chair and sits across from Peggy.
He closes his eyes when he drinks down that first cold slug—the best he’s felt all day. It’s as though his soul has been balled up and the beer loosens it at the edges. He sighs, with pleasure more than anything. He’s home. He’s safe. His sister prays for him, even if he won’t pray for himself.
“You okay, kid?” she asks.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“I don’t know. You work like a madman. Can’t remember the last time I saw you smile.”
He shrugs. “Yeah? When was the last time you even saw me?”
She laughs. “Stevie asked me the other day, ‘Does Uncle Charlie still live here?’ I said, ‘Last I heard.’”
“Sorry.”
“Even on Sundays, we come back from church and you’re gone. Where do you go?”
“I don’t know. Square dancing? Toastmasters? Knitting circle?”
She shakes her head at him. “When did you become a comedian? Is work good? You still hunting Commies?”
“Best I can.”
“Is it true what that Senator McCarthy says, that there’s a whole list of spies in the State Department?”
He shakes his head. “No. He’s a kook. There may be one. Even two. We have no proof.”
“I’m relieved. I’d look lousy in a babushka.”
He laughs. “You’d make it stylish.”
Her face turns serious. “I can’t help worrying. Imagine raising kids in a Communist world. Whispering the truth while the government yells lies. Not enough food. Sharing our house with two other families . . .”
“It’s not going to happen, Peg. Not here. Not now.”
“It happened in Poland.”
“It won’t happen here. I promise.”
She leans over and kisses his cheek. “Thanks to guys like you. I’m proud of you, kid. Listen.” She grabs his shoulder, abruptly changing tone. “I’ve been thinking about setting you up with Sherry Nowak. She’s Laura Mlynarski’s little sister. Very pretty girl. Blond and petite . . . and a perfect nose. An absolutely perfect nose.”
“I’m not interested in Sherry Nowak’s nose.”
“How about the rest of her?”
“Not right now.”
She squints her eyes, presses her lips together with annoyance.
“You know Linda doesn’t deserve your loyalty,” Peg says. “Never did.”
“It’s not about Linda.”
“I wonder,” Peg says, shaking her head in a worried, scolding way. The curlers bob. “You’ve been back almost four years, Charlie.”
“I know how long I’ve been back.”
“So what are you waiting for? Ma would have been pushing you to find someone if she were alive.”
“Well, Ma isn’t here.”
“Yeah. More’s the pity.” When Charlie looks at Peggy these days, he sees their mother when she was young. Confident. Kind. The same blue eyes. There wasn’t a person in the neighborhood who didn’t count on Lidia Szydlo, didn’t come to her for advice. She knew the right herb to soothe your cough, the right prayer to ease your heart, the right thing to say when no one else understood.
She died of pneumonia in April of ’45, just months before the end of the war and Charlie’s release. Peggy said St. Mary’s was so crowded for her funeral that people were standing in the vestibule. His father, who passed away a year after Charlie got home, told his son it broke his mother’s heart that she was the one who’d insisted he sign up early for the army, before the draft. She considered it her fault that Charlie ended up in the Philippines and might never come home.
“It killed her. Plain and simple.”
“You’re saying she died because of me?” he asked his father, not sure he could bear the weight and pain of another lost life. His own mother.