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.