Mother keeps war story to herself

Little was said about Eleanor Brown at her memorial, in the beautiful old chapel at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. She would have wanted it that way. Her daughter knew this as she skated lightly across the surface of a life well lived, recounting Eleanor's fondness for popcorn and poker and shoes, lots of shoes.

It was the words unspoken that best eulogized Eleanor Brown, capturing the reticence of one generation and the hunger of another as parents who revealed too little about their extraordinary lives keep slipping, too quickly, away.

Eleanor Brown was a 26-year-old secretary in Upstate New York when she enlisted with the first wave of recruits after the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps was mustered in 1942 to place women in the military's technical or clerical jobs, to free men for combat in World War II. She spent two years as a company clerk in Italy, dutifully writing home to her parents each week as the bloodiest war in history raged on around her.

When the war ended, 1st Sgt. Eleanor Brown returned to Sackets Harbor, N.Y., and became an Army wife. She raised a daughter, Christine, and never spoke of the war she helped win. "I knew she'd been a WAC in Naples, period," Christine says. "My mother was not a talker. I didn't really know my mom."

When Eleanor's pancreatic cancer was diagnosed three years ago, Christine began cleaning out her widowed mother's apartment in Sun City, Fla. There, in an old army footlocker tucked in a closet, she unearthed a stack of letters, more than 150.

"I started sitting on the floor, reading them to her," Christine recalls. "I realized she had this whole life ..."

I am stationed somewhere in Italy, much to my surprise. We live in a convent. ... Several little orphans go to school in this building and my heart just aches for them. They bring their lunch every day and all they have is a crust of bread. I am well and safe, so don't worry about me. -- Dec. 10, 1943

Christine, now 57, felt a small give in a window frozen shut. She tried to pry it open, peppering her mother with questions. What did you do, what did you see, whom did you love, what did you feel? The answers were minimal. Eleanor would claim she didn't remember, or it wasn't important. "Maybe it was modesty," Christine speculates. "But maybe some memories are lost simply because you don't share them."

Days before the memorial service at Arlington, she sits at the kitchen table of her Victorian in Montclair, N.J. She wonders what she can say as her mother's ashes are borne to the grave. "I don't have the stories," she laments.

In the memorial program, Christine cited Psalm 145:4. "One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts."

Did she have any regrets? Only two, Eleanor said. She wished she had had a wedding gown instead of the teal wool suit she was married in, and she was sorry she had never seen India. Her husband, Col. Noel Brown, had served there during the war and had painted such a vivid picture, Eleanor always wanted to go. Christine felt the same pull and visited India on her own 20 years ago.

Christine's children are busy teenagers, and they never ask about her life beyond motherhood, about her career as a high-powered executive, or about her adventures as a military brat living in postwar Japan or beneath a thatched roof in rural France. "I realize I don't talk much to my kids," she admits.

Tonight I'm going to the opera with a group of girls. It is 'Madame Butterfly.' -- Jan. 10, 1944

There are several cases of typhus here in the city so they have made it off-limits to all military personnel. ... Every Friday night we have to powder all our clothing and bedding. -- Jan. 18, 1944