light filled the night sky just before I heard the siren calling volunteers to the Fire House down the block. I ran downstairs. The bolted vault door between the kitchen and the passageway into the cell block was open. He never left it ajar.
“Dad!” I called into the dark hallway. My voice bounced off the steel walls. “There’s a fire!”
“I know!” He walked toward me. “It’s the high school. I’m evacuating the cells. The Fire Department needs help. My men and I are on the way. Stay here.”
And I saw them, the half dozen prisoners, behind him in the dim light. That was my father’s way, trusting people to do the right thing given the opportunity.
I watched him from my turret bedroom, walking with his inmates down the block to the Fire House. I watched them emerge, dressed in boots and heavy rain gear, and walk toward John Street. My father and his prisoners joined the long, losing battle to save the school on John Street.
Much later, when they came back, smudged and weary, I helped him make a vat of cocoa, and he and the men sat in our kitchen to drink it. And then he thanked them for their efforts, and locked them back in their cells.
The science wing had been saved, but the rest of the building was ruined. We squeezed into the gymnasium upstairs in the Common School, one giant classroom, for the remainder of the year. Science classes were still held at the high school.
Back in the Common School, sharing the odd makeshift classroom space of the gymnasium, things changed again between me and Neal. After the fire, we fell into the habit of walking together from the Common School across the cemetery to chemistry class in the surviving wing of the high school. And on a soft spring afternoon, as we walked between the graves, the lilac buds just beginning to swell, he asked me to go with him to the senior dance.
Grace McKee made my dress—taking apart a formal of her own, with fabric scarce and rationed. She fitted and pinned as I stood in her stuffy upstairs sewing room until I grew dizzy. She came to our house to do my hair the night of the dance. Grace unrolled the rag curlers and brushed and pinned the chestnut waves. I felt like a movie star and almost did not recognize myself!
Neal and my father were waiting together in the parlor when I came downstairs, floating in the cloud of organza and tulle.
“You look beautiful,” Neal said.
“You remind me of Helen,” said my father. And looking at my mother’s picture on the mantel, this time, I thought it might be true.
The entire town lined Juliana Street to watch the couples parade up the driveway to the Common School and then climb the stairs to the gym, decorated for the evening as a vineyard with purple balloons and green crepe paper. Our music teacher cued up records on the gramophone. Paper Doll, and My Heart Tells Me. I’d practiced dancing with Grace McKee—but found it easier to dance with Neal. It felt familiar, not strange, to be close to him as he held me and rested his chin on the top of my head and we swayed among the couples as Bing Crosby sang, softly, May I Love You.
Walking home that night, holding hands, we kissed in the alley between the school and the Jail. And he told me his news. He was deferring his football scholarship to Penn State. He and his best friend Joe had gone to Altoona to enlist in the Army. Joe had been turned down because of his bad leg, but Neal was going. “As soon as we graduate.”
D-Day came, just days before graduation.
“Will you still be going?” I asked, hoping he’d say no.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. It’s not over yet.” He grinned at me, excited.
Grace McKee hosted a graduation dinner for me, and for Neal.
“Best wishes to you both, and to Neal’s safe return,” my father said, raising a glass of iced tea. He had neither criticized nor supported Neal’s choice to enlist. “Each must follow the voice of conscience, Hazel,” he had said.
The night before he left, Neal took me for dinner at the Ship Hotel. The invitation pleased me. My father and I never ate at restaurants, and the Ship had a bar—which he did not approve of. But he let us go.
Neal drove us out of town in his father’s rusty pick-up, through the village of Schellsburg, up Route 30 west to the mountainside inn. The Ship had been built with a deck, and portholes for windows, and it clung to the steep slope of the mountain like a boat on a wave. Even the furniture inside was nautical. Neal dropped a nickel in the telescope at the railing beside the parking lot. We counted off the three states and seven counties promised on the plaque beside the coin-box. We ate at a window table overlooking the valley.
After dinner, back in the truck, I slid across the torn seat, almost snagging my skirt on a spring. I looked at his strong fingers with the square nails as he held the steering wheel. He smelled very faintly of sweat, but mostly of Lifebuoy soap. I wished we would never drive down from the top of the mountain, just drive further and further west.
“Want to drive up to the overlook?” he asked.
He parked by the guard rail at the Bald Mountain Overlook. Leaning on the truck, we watched the moon rise. Clouds blew in, covering the moon, filling the valley below.
“Do you think an ocean looks like that?” I asked.
“Don’t know yet, I’ll tell you,” he said.
I shivered.
“You’re cold,” he said, opening the truck door and boosting me inside. We kissed. He tasted of our after-dinner peppermint. With my tongue, I found the space between his teeth. He leaned over me, and I lay back in the cramped space, eager and yearning for the weight and warmth of him—but Neal pulled away, and drove us down the mountain back to town.
He stopped at the curb beneath the Jail. The glow of my father’s reading light shone through the curtain on his bedroom window.
“Joe’s taking me to the station in Cumberland tomorrow. Will you come?” Neal asked.
“Yes,” I said.
And we kissed good-bye for the night, a long, lingering kiss.
The next day, I sat between Joe and Neal on the drive. No one spoke as Joe drove us over the mountains, past rocky farms and orchards, to Cumberland, just beyond the Maryland border. Neal and I held hands. Too soon we descended into Cumberland, the Queen City, busy and important at the confluence of rivers and railroad lines.
We kissed on the station platform, and when the whistle blew it sounded like it was announcing the end of the world.
June 30th, my birthday, my father opened his roll top desk after the cake, before we left for our annual visit to my mother’s grave with our jam jar of violets. He withdrew a small, narrow box from one of the pigeonholes. Inside, a rose gold locket on a fine chain rested on white cotton batting. I snapped it open and found a tiny print of her high school graduation portrait. My own dark eyes looked out of the tiny frame.
I had a job at the Coffee Pot for the summer, the morning shift. Crossing off days on the calendar, I counted down to Neal’s furlough. He would arrive home after basic training at the end of August and then he would ship out. Soon after, I would leave for Bryn Mawr College.
I read and re-read his letters. “Got your box of cookies and the fudge from Miss McKee. They really came in handy. I’m learning blackjack. One fellow lost $45! Don’t worry, I’m careful. Yesterday we were out in the athletic field for two hours. We had to do the obstacle course. It’s a low hurdle, high hurdle, an alley to run through, an eight foot barrier, a tunnel thing, and a creek to broad jump. Two guys had to be carried back to the tents. Nothing else to say now, so I’ll close. Your friend, Neal.”
I wrote back, trying to spin something interesting from my quiet routine.
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