valley of Bedford my sophomore year. My father and I listened to the radio one dark Sunday in December and our cozy familiar kitchen felt cold and drafty.
The boys were galvanized, excited by the far away danger and opportunity for escape. Soon in yearbook club meetings, we were re-writing profiles for graduating seniors who had enlisted at the recruiting station in Altoona. My favorite English teacher started a knitting club and I joined. She was as good at teaching handwork as literature and we contributed miles of scarves to the war effort. We never doubted how useful they would be.
The Bedford Springs Hotel closed down, the frivolity of vacations suspended and gasoline rationed. The Keystone Naval Training School rented the hotel and The Mountain Navy came to town, to the delight of merchants and the young women and teenage girls in town. My father’s friend, the editor of The Bedford Gazette, said the grand ballroom on the second floor was set up with tables of receiving sets, earphones, and wires for the trainee radio operators. The private dining room where President Buchanan had received the first transatlantic cable from Queen Victoria was converted into a control room for transmissions, and the lounges became classrooms for theory and typing.
The former high school football coach came out of retirement to direct athletics for the trainees—touch football, softball, and mush-ball games on the golf course, volleyball contests on the hotel lawn, ping pong tournaments. The sailors practiced hand-to-hand combat on the lawn too, according to the photo on the front page of the newspaper. Some girls took after-school jobs at the Springs. They said the hotel had un-rationed supplies of Coca-Cola for the sailors and their guests, and poolside dances and hay rides to Lake Caledonia.
There was a new feature in The Gazette: “The Service News.” My father read it quietly, somberly. He was a convinced pacifist, and the deaths deeply troubled him. But so did the events in Europe and he said, to me and in Meeting, that it was not after all so easy to know what was right. Everyone in town followed who enlisted, who shipped overseas, who was home to “enjoy a ten-day furlough.” Some boys I knew made the sort of headlines no one wants. Missing, Now Dead; Supreme Sacrifice; Killed in Action. By my senior year, gold stars were shining in windows along every residential street in town. Boys I had known would not return from their adventurous escape to far-away places like Burma and Nanking.
And then that spring a local disaster came. A strange 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
