Up in Honey's Room Read Free

Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer, the highest rank in the SS.”
    He did, he looked an awful lot like Himmler, the wispy mustache, the same straight nose and the tiny glasses pinched to thebridge. Honey said, “Walter, I swear you look enough like Himmler to be his twin brother.”
    â€œYou flatter me,” Walter said.
    He seemed to smile—no, something was going on in his head. Honey watched his eyes shift away and come back to linger on her, his voice hushed to keep what he said between them.
    â€œHeinrich Himmler was born the seventh of October, 1900. Which is the same day I was born.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œIn the same hospital in Munich.”
    This time she said, “Wow,” impressed, and said, “You think there’s a chance you really are Himmler’s twin?”
    â€œThe same hospital, the same day, the same time of birth and, as you see, the same likeness. The question I ask myself,” Walter said, “if Heinrich and I are of the same blood, from the loins of the same woman, why were we separated?”

Two
    H oney’s intercom buzzed while she was getting ready to go to work. The male voice said hi, he was Kevin Dean, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation; he’d like to talk to her about Walter Schoen. Honey said, “You all are just getting around to Walter? I haven’t seen him in five years.”
    Kevin Dean said he knew that, he still would like to talk to her. Honey said, “He didn’t do anything subversive then that I know of and I doubt he has now. Walter isn’t the real thing, he pretends he’s a Nazi.”
    She buzzed open the door downstairs and put her flannel bathrobe on over her bra and panties, her hose and garter belt. Then paused and said, “Hmmmm.” Took off her bra and the bathrobe and slipped on an orange-colored kimono with red and ochre trim to be more comfortable.
    It was a morning in late October 1944, America at war nearly three years. In the Philippines again since yesterday.
    Honey was a buyer now in Better Dresses at Hudson’s, moving up in her world from a flat in Highland Park to a one-bedroom apartment on Covington Drive, a block from Palmer Park where she’d learned to ice-skate in the winter and play tennis in the summer. At night she would hear the streetcars on Woodward Avenue turn around at the fairgrounds and head back six miles to downtown and the Detroit River.
    She had returned home only once since leaving Walter, late last year taking a bus to Harlan County for her mother’s funeral, dead of respiratory failure, Honey with a twinge of guilt standing by the casket, the daughter who’d left home for the big city to live her own life, meet all kinds of people instead of coal miners and guys who cooked moonshine. She did ask her sister-in-law to come to Detroit, stay as long as she wanted, and Muriel said as she always did she’d think about it.
    Well, since Honey was in Kentucky anyway, she might as well hop a bus over to Eddyville and see how her brother Darcy was doing in prison. My Lord, he actually seemed quieter and listened for a change. Or was it seeing Darcy sober for the first time in years? He had taken prison courses to finish high school at age thirty-two and no longer acted bored or like he knew everything. He’d grown a mustache and actually did resemble Errol Flynn a little. She told him, “You do, ” and Darcy said, “Oh, you think so?” He’d have his release pretty soon but wasn’t going back to digging coal. “You’ll be drafted,” Honey said, “if they take ex-cons.” He grinned at her the way the old Darcy used to grin, sure of himself, saying he had learned meat cutting and planned to get in the meat-processing business, make some money and stay out of the army. Honey thinking, Maybe he hasn’t changed after all.
    Then this past August she got a phone call out of the blue,