THE DAY THE WAR ENDED
by Patrick Breheny
The sirens awoke Jeremy. It was a cacophony in six or eight pieces, coming at the ward from every direction, from all of the city, as though the hospital building were at the center, and the warnings ululated in response to some request it made.
The sirens always frightened him, their determined whine like that of a monstrous child whose very bulk permitted a volume over which his own cries could not be heard. Usually he pressed his palms flat against his ears, and hid by pouring his tear drenched face into Mommy’s stomach. But his mother wasn’t here. Jeremy was five, and this was the first morning of his life that he’d awakened without her. He’d last seen her yesterday, in the evening. She’d kissed him goodbye, he had cried, but it did no good. She’d stayed a long time, but was insistent about leaving. Jeremy was tucked in, his teddy was on his chest, and Mommy left. She had told him that today would be the day when his tonsils came out, they would wake him very early in the morning, and kept saying something about “either” that he didn’t understand, except he thought it somehow meant he had a choice about staying if he could figure out what was expected of him.
He cried, of course. It wasn’t just the terrible blaring of the sirens that disturbed him, but the way it affected adults too. There was one afternoon in the park with his mother, his little brother asleep in a stroller, an aggregation of other carriages, children and young mothers anchored around a bench, when the sirens started with a low pitched moan, like a banshee his mother had said. The community of strollers, babies, women and children became a sudden swirl of motion, and they broke off from each other into separate clumps at the park entrance, going in various directions to their apartment homes. The monster was just practicing with that low bass, testing its lung capacity, and as his mother ran along the street with stroller, admonishing him to hurry, the banshee screeched its highest pitch, shrieking so loud it seemed to Jeremy all the world had gone insane.
When they got home, his mother began drawing the shades. His mother’s sister, Aunt Jeanette, was there. “Baby JIM” had slept through all of it, and Jeremy’s mother put him into the crib. Jeremy liked the living room with the shades down during the day; it seemed cool and safe, especially after the sirens, which had now stopped. He was sitting beside his aunt on the couch. His mom and aunt talked about the war.
Whatever it was, the war was something people talked about. The women in the park with the carriages had spoken of it. Gus the old man butcher who once gave him a slice of bologna, winking as he took the ration coupons from his mother, mentioned the war whenever they went into his store. And the sirens had something to do with it too.
Aunt Jeanette said something about Europe, and his mother exclaimed, “Let’s pray God it doesn’t come here.” Jeremy didn’t know what Europe was, so he didn’t know why she wanted it to stay away. Maybe something like measles.
Suddenly that afternoon the intemperate thing screamed again, and Jeremy’s face was in his mother’s dress. She stroked his shoulders, saying “It’s alright now. It’ll stop in a minute. That just means its over.”
“Don’t be afraid,” the nurse on the ward said, her face glimmering with victory and relief. “They’re blowing the sirens because the war is over.”
Jeremy couldn’t fathom what she was talking about. .”There’ll be confetti from all the buildings, and half of New York will be drunk by this afternoon, if you know what that is,” she continued, but Jeremy wasn’t paying attention to any of it.
What did she mean that the war was over? How could the war end? It was inconceivable to him. The war WAS, that’s all. Like Mommy and Daddy-away- in- it, and God and Aunt Jeanette and three year old Baby Jim (though come to think of it, he’d snook his way in somehow.)
The ward nurse smiled while two others put him on a mobile stretcher. “I’m going to have an ice cream ready for you this afternoon,” she beamed. Jeremy didn’t trust he woman. Anyone who’d say something like that, just because he was crying…
The new nurses wheeled him through a corridor, then opened a door, and suddenly he was in a room filled with men dressed like Gus the butcher. There were four of them around a table that looked like Gus’s chopping block, only much larger. Jeremy sprung forward and was almost off the table when the nurses caught him. The men wrestled him to the chopping block. They held his arms and legs down. “We’re not going to hurt you, son,” one of them said gently. More deception. “When I tell you, I want you to start counting from ten backwards. Now relax and take a deep breath.” Jeremy tried. As soon as he exhaled, one of them stuffed something over his nose and mouth. He couldn’t breathe. They were suffocating him Didn’t they know they were suffocating him. He shouted through the gauze that was smothering him, “Wait! I want to tell you something. Just take it off for a minute. I can’t breathe.” His arms struggled to reach the map, rip it off, but the hands that pinned them were stronger. They were killing him, he had no doubt about it, and his mother didn’t know. She didn’t even know the war was over. They’d tricked her into staying away.
He heard a voice saying softly, “Count.” It was reassuring to know they were still talking to him. He started at ten, but got no further. Nine was a perfect symmetrical world of vivid colors. The cloudless sky was so blue it looked to have a third dimensional texture, and Jeremy walked on a narrow sun laved concrete sidewalk that was evenly divided in sections every four feet, an endless bleached sand-beige path neatly bordered on each side by trim vibrant green grass. Through this world, infinite, unlimited in its exactness, he walked. I was a colorful world, but impersonal and indifferent, unpleasant by its precision, and he was in it alone.
When he opened his eyes, he was in bed on the ward. He marveled that they had brought him back, actually placed him in the bed without his knowledge. .Mommy was there; she smiled at him and said, “How do you feel?” His throat was sore, though there was plenty he wanted to say to her. He wanted to know what he could have done to avoid that, why she hadn’t made his choices clearer, but the words hurt to much coming out. She pressed a buzzer by the bed, and the ward nurse arrived, knowing exactly why she was called. She carried a large dish if vanilla ice cream and a spoon.
“They always lie this afterwards,” she said cheerfully. Jeremy was beginning to think he might have been wrong about her after all. The first spoonful of ice cream soothed his throat enough to ask, “Did the war end yesterday?”
“Today,” his mother said, “It ended today.” Then, seeing his confusion, said, “Oh dear, you’ve just been sleeping. It’s still today.”
And indeed Jeremy was a bit bewildered. He wakes up and his mother says its yesterday; yesterday she wasn’t even here; then those men suffocated him; most alarming of all, the war was gone. Yesterday, or today, something had changed; he was beginning to see how things can change. The ice cream flowed into the fire in his throat, and he was still sleepy. He remembered his friend Freddy told him there was no Santa Claus, whom Jeremy thought was God, and when he told an old lady in the park he didn’t believe in God anymore because Freddy didn’t, she really got mad at him.
His mother held his hand. “You get some rest, honey. I’ll have more good news to talk about when you’re home. ”She had a dreamy far off smile on her face. “Soon your father will return, and we’ll see what we can do about getting you another brother, or a sister.” Another one, he thought wearily; the least she could do was decide which she was getting. It sounded like that “either” business again. Why did people consult him if they were going to do things they way they wanted anyway?
And then he had a scintilla of hope. At last he thought he understood what his mother meant. Maybe he could stop things from changing, not just choose either a brother or a sister. The ice cream was finished and he was almost asleep. His throat scorched as he pushed the words out, transported past swollen lips by an enormous lumbering tongue. His voice crackled, the pitch wavering in an uneven rasp. He said, “I don’t want either, Mommy.”
“Shh,” she said. “We’ll talk about it later. Just go to sleep now.” And so he did, resigned and haggard. Some things would change and there was nothing he could do about it. He grasped her hand tightly because he did not want her to leave, and even after he was snoring, held on for a long time.
(The war referred to of course is World War II. Unfortunately, we’ve had a few more since then. And regarding the "either" business, if you didn't quite get that, the most commonly used surgical aneshesia in the 1940's was ether, thus a small boy's confusion between "ether" and "either"--- not to mention God and Santa Claus)