Collette just blinked at me. Two tears trailed down her face. “But . . . ,” she finally said. “But things were found at your house.”

  “Just a book and a few letters and some pictures of his family,” I said. “They don’t mean anything. They’re going to release Papa. They have to. He’s done nothing wrong.”

  Collette swiped at her tears and looked away from me. “My parents won’t let me be friends with you right now. I have to go.”

  She brushed past me and I heard her swallow a sob at the back of her throat.

  I came home from school that afternoon still dazed by the sting of Collette’s words to me in the library. I wanted Mommi to put her arms around me and tell me to hold tight for just a few more days. Just a few more. Because then Papa would be home and we could put this terrible time in our lives behind us and go back to being who we had been before those two black cars pulled up alongside our house.

  When I stepped inside the kitchen from the laundry room, I was surprised to see the breakfast dishes still sitting unwashed in the sink. A frying pan with shriveled remnants of fried egg clinging to its side still sat on a cold burner on the stove. Bits of a broken water glass glistened on the floor. The house was eerily quiet.

  My first thought was the FBI had come for Mommi this time. They’d come for her before she’d had a chance to wash up the breakfast things, and had pulled her out of the house, just like they’d taken Papa, with handcuffs around her wrists. Max and I were alone. Our parents had been taken from us and now we were alone. Not only did we not have anyone; no one would want us, either.

  Max hadn’t had the reaction from his classmates at the elementary school that I was having; his friends were more curious than appalled. But he had gotten the same accusing looks at the market and post office that Mommi and I had received. Even at the little Lutheran church where my parents were members, the predominantly German congregation avoided us for fear of guilt by association, and yet Max hadn’t seemed troubled that he, Mommi, and I could attend church and barely have a word of greeting spoken to us. But now he would know how terrible our situation was, when someone from the child welfare office came for him and me, as surely one would. I could already imagine that person coming up the front walk: a dour-faced older woman with pulled-back hair, a pinched face, a clipboard in her hand, and clunky black shoes on her pudgy feet that clicked when she walked. She would ask Max and me with a frown if we had any family who could take us in.

  No, I would say.

  No one? No one at all? she would reply, staring at me with condemning eyes.

  All our family is in Germany, Max would probably say, and I’d wince, and the child welfare worker would shake her head in disgust and mark something on her clipboard.

  I can’t promise I can keep you together, she was going to say. No one is going to want either one of you.

  “Mommi?” I cried out, my voice dispelling this horrible vision. I moved through the kitchen and into the living room. A load of laundry half-folded lay on the sofa.

  “Mommi?” I said, quieter this time, now afraid to shout her name and announce to the world that both my parents had been taken from me.

  I took the staircase slowly, wanting to see for myself that the house was empty and dreading it at the same time. “Mommi?” I whispered as I climbed.

  I peeked into my parents’ bedroom, my heart flip-flopping in my chest.

  There was Mommi on her bed, sleeping in the middle of the day, a balled-up handkerchief in one hand. A sheaf of papers lay flattened under the elbow of her other arm.

  Relief coursed through me but only for a moment. Somehow I knew those papers explained the unwashed dishes, the broken water glass, the sleeping form of my mother at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  I walked toward her, willing her to awaken and tell me what those papers said. But she lay unmoving, except for the rise and fall of her chest. I leaned over and gently pulled the papers out from under her arm.

  They were rumpled and tearstained and I could see right away they were official government papers. They included the warrant for my father’s arrest, the accusations against him, the results of a hearing he’d had in Des Moines—he’d been deemed a credible threat to the safety of the United States—and a declaration that he’d been remanded to Fort Lincoln, an internment camp outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, where he would be kept for the duration of the war. He could appeal. He could have visitors. But his bank accounts would continue to be frozen so that they could not be used to fund any kind of enemy activity on his behalf while he was incarcerated. Appeals could be directed to the attorney general of the United States, Francis Biddle.

  I sank to the floor by the bed with the papers in my hand, my back resting against the mattress. I could feel the nubby chenille flowers on the bedspread through my shirt, like little fingertips tapping me on the back as I slid down to a hooked rug composed of all the prettiest shades of blue.

  I didn’t know how far away Bismarck was, but I knew it had to be hundreds of miles. Hundreds. Mommi didn’t drive. We would not have the money for train tickets if Papa’s bank accounts were frozen. There would be no way of visiting Papa. He might as well have been sent to the North Pole. Even though it would be six months before I saw my father again, he never felt so lost to me as in that moment. Tears slipped unchecked down my face.

  I was still sitting there many minutes later when I heard Max come into the house, slamming the side door as little boys tend to do when they come inside. Mommi stirred for a second and then relaxed.

  I rose, folded the sheaf of papers, and set them neatly on her bedside table, rather than back under her arm. I wanted her to know I had seen them, that she didn’t have to find the words to tell me what they said. Then I scrubbed at my cheeks to whisk away the evidence that I’d been crying and headed downstairs.

  Max had pulled off his stocking cap, and his curly blond hair was all askew, making him look as if he’d been caught up in a whirlpool. He was at the kitchen table, pulling papers, and then an apple core, and then a book out of his school satchel. His eyes brightened when he saw me enter the kitchen.

  “Look!” he said, extending the book toward me so that I could see its cover. “It’s about cowboys! My teacher said I could have it. She got two by mistake.”

  “How nice of her,” I said numbly, briefly looking at the cover and then bending down to carefully pick up the pieces of the glass.

  “It has pictures and everything,” Max said, looking at the cover adoringly and not even curious about the broken glass. “I’m going to be a cowboy when I grow up.” He looked at me as though there was no question at all that he’d be a rancher astride a horse someday. “Where’s Mommi?”

  I tossed the shards into the trash and then turned on the hot-water tap at the kitchen sink. “She’s resting.”

  “I want to show her my book.”

  “Later,” I said, squirting dish soap in the stream of water. “Let her rest.”

  “Is she sick?”

  I swished the soapy bubbles and slid the breakfast dishes into the water. They disappeared into the suds. “She’s just tired.”

  Max pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. “Can I have cookies?”

  I wiped my wet hands on my skirt and opened the cabinet where Mommi kept the cereal and oatmeal and crackers and Nabisco gingersnaps. There was hardly anything in it. A box of Cream of Wheat. A package of rice. A tin of saltines.

  I just stood there and stared, realizing what I should have grasped from the get-go. Papa wasn’t bringing home a paycheck. He’d been gone for two weeks already. His bank accounts had been frozen. Mommi hadn’t had many sewing jobs lately, and now she might not be able to attract any. The earth seemed to shift a little beneath my feet as all these truths fell over me. Mommi would run out of money. Maybe she already had.

  “Look, Elise,” Max was saying. “This cowboy has a palomino. I want a palomino someday. I’m going to name him Peter Pan.”

  As I turned to look at my brother, I closed the cabinet door. “How about toast and peanut butter?”

  At that same moment, I saw Mommi at the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She was looking at me, watching me close the cabinet door. She had the sheaf of papers in her hand. Max saw her, too.

  “Mommi, look!” He held up his book. “Teacher said I could keep it.”

  Mommi turned to look at Max and the gift, at the evidence that apparently good still happened in this world. Without a word, she sat down by my brother at the table to look at his book with him. The sheaf of papers she placed upside down next to her. I reached for the bread bin and pulled out the loaf Mommi had made yesterday and plugged in the toaster. Soon the kitchen was filled with the aroma of the toasting bread, nutty and sweet. I washed up the breakfast dishes as Max ate the toast and looked at the cowboy book with Mommi silent beside him.

  When he was finished, Mommi stood up, picked up the papers, and thanked me for taking care of the dishes. She didn’t tell Max that day that Papa had been sent to a federal camp in North Dakota and that she didn’t know when he’d be coming home. She waited until the next day, when the novelty of having been given the book had worn off a bit, so that the news of Papa’s incarceration wouldn’t spoil it for him.

  I never told my mother what Collette had said to me in the library, but then, I didn’t have to tell her. Collette stopped coming over to the house and I stopped going over to hers. Papa had always said Mommi had a tender soul, but I think what he’d really been trying to say all along was that Mommi was fragile. He had wanted me to be careful as I grew into a young woman, not to say things that would hurt her. I decided that day I would keep as much about school to myself as I could since Mommi already had so much to contend with.

  That first month, Mommi found a way to keep food in the house, though not much of it. The heat was kept on, but only for a few hours a day—in the mornings when we got ready for school, and just before we went to bed. Mrs. Brimley started leaving a basket of food and staples on our doorstep on Sunday mornings. It was my job to take the empty basket back to her and to express our thanks. Mommi was so shamed at having to accept it, she could not face our neighbor. Mrs. Brimley would then invite me in and ask about Papa. Where was he? How long would he have to be there? How was my mother faring? How was she paying the bills? There was so much I didn’t know that I couldn’t answer most of her questions. I got the impression she felt it was her Christian duty to help us, but she was wondering how much longer she would have to keep doing it.

  Papa’s transfer to the North Dakota internment camp meant to everyone in our little corner of Davenport that he was what the FBI said he was, the enemy. As the novelty of my family’s predicament wore off, I could tell that some of the kids in my school felt sorry for me, Collette especially, and they would glance at me with sad eyes. Even Agnes Finster, who I’d long suspected had taken my favorite hair ribbons out of my gym locker, gave me a sorrowful look as she silently handed them back to me. Other kids, mainly the same boys who tormented Artie, would walk past me in the hallways and murmur, “Dirty German.” The first time that happened, I was late for English because I’d spent ten minutes in the girls’ restroom savagely rubbing away my tears while telling myself I wasn’t a dirty anything. On another morning, a boy named Burt, who had always been relatively polite to me before Papa’s arrest, and who had a father serving in the military, told me as third period was ending and we were leaving the classroom that, when flying especially low, the German Luftwaffe liked to train their machine guns on playgrounds full of British children.

  “Did you know that?” he said calmly but coolly. He held my gaze, as if daring me to say he was wrong.

  “I’m an American,” I said, for lack of anything better to say and with my breath catching in my throat.

  “And your father? What is he?”

  Burt walked away and I yelled at his retreating back that my father was the kindest man I knew, that he’d never hurt anyone, and that he loved this country. Burt said nothing in return. He didn’t speak to me again that day or that week or the rest of the school year. As the weeks rolled on, Collette would find little moments now and then to tell me she missed me and was praying every day for the war to end so that my father could come home. But I was someone not to be seen with. I was the pariah now. Even Artie kept his distance from me. I was not the only girl in my school born of German immigrant parents; there were many others. But I was the only one whose father had been arrested and declared an enemy alien of the United States.

  I was whatever anyone said I was, and I didn’t know how to be anyone else.

  6

  The daffodils that my mother had planted under the living room window years ago had just started to bloom on the day Max and I were informed we couldn’t live in our house anymore. Papa had been gone for three months. With a gaze on us like that of a sleepwalker, Mommi told us we’d be moving into a much smaller cottage on the eastern edge of Davenport, past the cemetery and nearly out to the highway. My brother and I had just arrived home from school and were sitting on the sofa. Outside, the world was slowly tossing off its winter cloak. The last of the snow had melted except for patches in the shaded places. I had seen six robins on my way home from school. It was the middle of April and they had taken their time coming back to us.

  “Why?” Max had asked. “Why are we moving? This is our house.”

  “It’s not,” Mommi replied in a toneless voice I didn’t recognize. “Someone else owns it. We’ve just been paying them to live here.”

  I knew we were losing the house because of money. Rent was owed on the house and we couldn’t pay it. Mommi had applied for state assistance three weeks after Papa was taken. A little while after that, checks from the government started showing up in our mailbox, along with letters from Papa and correspondence from the many people Papa told Mommi to write on his behalf. Mommi’s eyes would glisten with tears when one of those checks was in the mail. She both hated them and needed them. By the time she started getting them she’d already sold Papa’s car and the good china and the silver tea service Oma and Opa had given my parents as a wedding gift. She had even sent a letter to Cousin Emil back in New York asking for help, but he’d written back that he couldn’t get involved and risk his own standing as a recently naturalized citizen. He had told Mommi not to write to him again.

  Knowing all of this, and especially how much she hated those checks, I nevertheless reminded her that she was getting them when she told us about the house.

  Mommi turned her empty gaze to me. “They’re not enough, Elise. I can’t pay the landlord and the heating bill and the electric company and then feed and clothe us on what they send. It’s not enough. And who knows if they will keep sending them.”

  She blinked long and slow, like she wanted to disappear into dreamland and never wake up.

  “But . . . but this is our home,” I said, and then immediately wished I hadn’t. It was like a blade to my mother’s chest, hearing that. She flinched.

  “It’s just a house,” she said, turning her face from me. “Papa said we’ll get another one. A better one. With a wraparound porch.”

  Mommi had always wanted a big porch with baskets of impatiens hanging from its eaves and wooden rockers and a swing. Papa had said someday he’d make sure she had one.

  “Papa knows about this?” I said.

  That comment, too, seemed to inflict a wound.

  “We’ll get another house,” she said again, in a monotone that was clearly an echo of what he surely had written her to say to Max and me.

  My brother and I didn’t see the letters Papa wrote to her solely, only the ones he sent to all three of us, which were frequent but brief. He usually wrote to us about what he and the other internees did for entertainment and recreation, and what they ate, and how much he missed us. Fort Lincoln was like a little city where everyone found something they could do within the fences and did it. Papa taught English language lessons to fellow internees in the mornings and worked in the camp kitchen in the afternoon. All the days were the same, though, so Papa’s letters were all pretty much the same. He was well. He was not being mistreated. We were not to worry about him. We would be together again soon and we’d go for picnics again on Credit Island down by the river and have swim races at the Natatorium.

  I knew the letters he wrote to Mommi had to be different, so when I had happened upon one a few weeks earlier, addressed just to her, my hand reached for it. She had forgotten it on the coffee table when she left the house to take Max to a dentist appointment. And even though I knew I shouldn’t have, I read it. It was short, in English, and it had clearly been read and stamped by camp officials, like all his other letters had been. Half of the note was one long plea for Mommi not to despair, to stay strong, to not give in to hopelessness. The other half was a request that she keep looking for avenues to bolster his appeal. He’d requested that she try writing to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as he’d heard she was sympathetic to the plight of innocent and interned Germans and Japanese immigrants. Nothing good had transpired from any letter to Mrs. Roosevelt that I could see.

  Three days later a couple of Papa’s friends from the lab at Boyer AgriChemical helped us move our furniture out of the gray and white house. These two men, George and Stan, were Papa’s closest friends at work, and their wives had always been friendly to Mommi. But my father’s arrest had changed their opinion of him. I could see this in their eyes. Papa had no doubt reached out to them and begged them to help us move, and they had done so, but even I could see they helped us not so much because Papa asked them to but because they pitied Mommi and what Papa’s actions had done to her.

  Mommi had sold enough things, like the empty china cabinet, that there were fewer boxes and pieces of furniture than there might have been if the war had never come and we’d just decided to move to a different house on our own. One with a wraparound porch, perhaps.

 

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