But with the world in flames, with the European continent in the hands of the Germans, with most of their European relatives either missing or in hiding from the Nazis, with the United States fighting what looked to be a lo sing battle for its very existence, Joseph Schild reasoned that his wife would see that their daughter’s pregnancy was a joyful thing and an affirmation of life. In Memphis, at his first sight of Sarah, Joseph Schild’s eyes filled with tears. Not tears of sadness, he realized, but rather because Sarah looked like a living Madonna.
Her skin glowed, her somewhat solemn eyes glistened. “Bitch!” his wife had screamed at their daughter in the suite in the Peabody.
“Godless whore! %%y don’t you and your bastard die!” Joseph Schild had had to physically restrain his wife until the hotel could find a doctor who would come to the suite and sedate her. The instant her mother and father were gone, Sarah went into an emotional nose dive.
Two days later, she still had not recovered when, on the day the radiogram from General Chermault arrived in Chicago, she was delivered of a healthy, seven-pound-five-ounce boy in Memphis’s Doctors Hospital.
The father was listed as “unknown” and the birth added to the statistics as ” illegitimate.” Ann Chambers decided that this was not the moment to tell Sarah that Eddie had been injured, had almost been killed.
Postnatal depression had come sooner than it usually did, and with a greater severity than the doctor had expected. In the delivery room he had thought admiringly that Sarah was a tough little cookie. Sarah was in the hospital ten days, and then-still depressed-returned to the suite in the Peabody. There was a nurse all day, but she was alone when the nurse left at five until Ann came home from The Advocate.
Mich meant that Ann often had to rush home when she would have preferred to work. In their suite, Ann steamed open the letter over a teakettle on a hot plate, read the letter, carefully resealed the envelope, and then went to Sarah’s door. She flung the door open and, waving the letter, went inside. “Poppa is finally heard from!” she cried. Sarah turned the envelope in her hands and saw the return address. “Oh, my God!” she said.
“He’s in the hospital! Then she tore it open and read it.
Calcutta, India 7 April 1942
Dear Sarah:
I have continued to receive your fine and regular letters, and regret that I have been such a terrible correspondent. I was involved in a small accident, slightly Li@juring my leg, and am spending, as you might have noticed from the return address, some time in the hospital.
I hasten to say that I am really quite well, and there is no cause for concern. And being in the hospital finally gives me a chance to answer your many letters. My big news (which you may also have noticed from the return address) is that I axa back in the Navy. An officer from the staff of the Commander, Naval Element, US. Forces in India came to see me yesterday. He got right to the point. Now that I wasn’t going to be of much use to the AVG, had I given any thought to “coming home’?
I told him that I was obliged to fulfill my contract with the AVG, which has until July 4 to run, but he told me that the AVG was willing to let me out of it. My leg will be in a cast for another month or six weeks, and probably a little stiff after that, and by the time I’d be ready to fly again, my contract would just about be over. I thought it was really quite decent of the Navy to take me back as a temporary cripple, but they went even beyond that. We were promised (I guess I can now tell you) that we would be taken back into the Navy with no loss of seniority, and that if we were promoted while in the AVG, we would receive a promotion in the Navy. It seems that the Navy has a policy by which lieutenants (junior grade) with six months in the war zone are considered eligible for promotion, so they took that into consideration, and then also made good their word to promote me since I had been promoted in the AVG. What that means is that I’m back in the Navy with a grade (temporary, of course) two grades higher than I was the last time I saw you. I find it hard, frankly, to think of myself as Lieutenant Commander Bitter (all the lieutenant commanders I knew were old men), but it must be so, for that’s what it says on the sign on my bed. The other good news is that I will be returned to the United States. A hospital ship is en route here, and as soon as they have enough people to fill it up (and there probably will be more than enough by the time it gets here) I’ll be returned to the United States.