I think everyone knew that Clara and Ben were supposed to be together, even before they knew it themselves. Our families were friends when they were children. My mother and Ben’s mother always said the way that he was so compassionate towards Clara just showed that she would always have a place in his heart. They weren’t like the other children their age; they didn’t pull hair, yell, or take each others toys. They just would sit quietly together and tell each other stories about princes slaying dragons, or imagining what it would be like to travel to distant places like Japan or Iceland together as adults. It was almost like their souls held bits and pieces of each other, making them two halves that fit together in the most complementary ways. Even I knew it, despite the fact that I was even younger than they were. I grew up not only with Ben as an older brother, but with Clara like an adoptive older sister to me.
In 1942, Ben’s passion for adventure got the best of him. It was strange at first. You see, he wanted to buy himself and Clara a home, but he went about it so hastily, he bought the first one he saw. He started stashing his money away in a wooden box, saying it was for “someone who would need it.” One month, his money hiding lead to him getting his electricity shut off. He would come to our parents home with Clara to cook their meals and use our bathroom. When I asked Clara about it, she said she thought it was just him panicking about the idea of an airstrike like he heard about on the radio. She was too in love to look into any of it, she really did believe everything would proceed as normal. Our family thought he had gone mad due to his frantic nature, and we thought Clara had too for tolerating it, but we all understood when he made the announcement three days before Thanksgiving that he was leaving for war. We heard it at the same moment Clara did. No one had time to react, because she was there one second and gone the next, leaving behind the echo of her sobs in our dimly lit foyer as she sat on the wooden staircase, blocking out Ben’s pleas to understand. Aside from the sobs, and the sound of my brother’s shaking voice, there was only silence in the house. The last thing I remember of that day is the fearful look in my father’s glassy eyes, before I escorted myself out of the room to be alone. I didn’t cry when he made the announcement, but I certainly didn’t understand Ben’s reasons for going when what he was trying to fix had already been taken care of.
I didn’t see very much of Clara or Ben over those next few weeks. My parents grew worried about having to watch their only son ship out for Europe. My father in particular. Although I never met his brother, my uncle Vincent, I knew his death in the first war is what instilled the fear in my father. Part of us always knew that Ben had a passion for adventure, but we thought it would bring him to those magical places he used to discuss with Clara as a child, not into a battle zone where people were dying everyday. He didn’t even have to say why he wanted to go; we all had our own assumptions. Like I said, I knew it was for adventure and the idea that whatever the army paid him would help our parents rebuild the mechanic business, but I never understood why he wanted that so badly. My father was close to 50 at this point. He didn’t want to go back to working on old automotives that were run into the ground after so many years. He found his solace in working at the local bookstore where he could write all day, while my mother worked down the street at a florist shop that planned weddings and funerals. They certainly weren’t paid a fortune, but they certainly were happy. My brother felt helpless as a child watching them suffer; he wanted to return to that time to try to fix what he couldn’t back then. He couldn’t accept the fact it wasn’t possible.