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Frau Stauffer took a look in the box.
“Oh, so much,” she said.
“Tell her my mother got a letter from them, and then wrote me, and here we are,” Cronley ordered.
Hessinger made the translation.
Frau Stauffer pulled out a drawer in a massive chest of drawers, came out with a photo album, laid it on the table and began to page through it. Finally, she found what she wanted, and motioned for Cronley to look.
It was an old photograph. Husband, wife, and two young children, a boy of maybe ten and a girl who looked to be several years younger.
“Luther’s Papa,” Frau Stauffer said, laying her finger on the boy, and then moving it to the girl. “Dein mutter.”
“She says the girl in the picture is your mother,” Hessinger translated.
“Ask him,” Frau Stauffer asked, “if he has a picture of his mother now.”
Hessinger translated.
As a matter of fact, I have two of her. Right here in my wallet.
Let me show you.
The first one was taken at College Park, the day I graduated from A&M. That’s Mom, the lady in the mink coat with the two pounds of pearls hanging around her neck. The girl sitting on the fender of the custom-bodied Packard 280 is our neighbor’s kid. Sort of my little sister. I called her “the Squirt.”
In this picture, that’s my mom standing next to President Truman. That’s my dad, pinning on my captain’s bars. This was taken the day after I married the Squirt, and the day she got herself killed.
“Tell her, ‘Sorry. I have a couple, but I left them back at the Kloster.’”
Hessinger made the translation, but, picking up on Cronley’s slip, said, “kaserne,” not “Kloster.”
Cronley saw on Luther’s face that the translation was unnecessary.
Why is Cousin Luther pretending he doesn’t speak English?
“Kloster?” Luther asked.
And he picked up on that, too.
“The lieutenant’s little joke,” Hessinger said. “Our kaserne is in the middle of nowhere, twenty miles outside Munich. The lieutenant jokes that we’re all monks, kept in a kloster far from the sins of the city.”
Luther smiled and then asked, “What exactly do you do in the Army?”
“Lieutenant, he wants to know exactly what you do in the Army.”
“Tell him the 711th is responsible for making sure that the equipment in every mess hall in the European Command—and for that matter, in U.S. Forces in Austria—meets Army standards.”
Hessinger made the translation. Luther confessed he didn’t completely understand. Hessinger made that translation, too.
“You tell him what we do, Sergeant,” Cronley ordered.
Hessinger rose to the challenge. He delivered a two-minute lecture detailing the responsibility the 711th QM Mobile Kitchen Repair Company had with regard to maintaining the stoves, ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, and other electrome
chanical devices to be found in U.S. Army kitchens.
He explained that there were three teams who roamed Germany, Austria, and France inspecting and repairing such devices. Team 2 was commanded by Lieutenant Cronley. A dishwasher had broken down in Salzburg, and Team 2 had been dispatched to get it running.
Lieutenant Cronley had decided, Hessinger told Luther, that since Strasbourg was more or less on their way to the malfunctioning dishwasher, it was an opportunity for him to drop off the things his mother had sent to her family.
