that their unmarried nineteen-year-old daughter was pregnant.
Her first reaction—rage and fear—had put Sarah’s mother into the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, for six weeks. But Joseph Schild had taken his wife out of the IOL against medical advice when she asked to go to Memphis.
Sarah shared a suite in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis with her best friend from Bryn Mawr, Ann Chambers. There was no question in Joseph Schild’s mind that Ann, the daughter of Brandon Chambers, the newspaper publisher, was in Memphis as much to give Sarah refuge from her mother in New York as she was to work for her father’s newspaper.
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 losing 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! Why 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 nosedive. Two days later, she still had not recovered when, on the day the radiogram from General Chennault 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. Which 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 injuring 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 am back in the Navy. An officer from the staff of the Commander, Naval Element, U.S. 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)