Heart Won and Lost
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

I was born in 1922 on a farm in Kansas. I wish I could tell stories of the time when our farm was green, productive and profitable but those were just things I heard. The first big drought came in 1930, and after that the dust storms destroyed all that we had. The end finally came in April 1935, on the day they called “Black Sunday” when the dark dust from the west blocked out the sun.

That day I was in church with my mother. She went to church to pray for deliverance from the Dust Bowl that had plagued the southern states of the Great Plains for those five years, but that day the last speck of workable soil was blown from our land. She never recovered.

I was in church to sing. My mother said that my voice was a gift from God. She said that to hear me made her believe, and as I sang that day I could see her face looked better than dead as it did most days. She could hear me reach those high notes and that restored her faith. But then the howling of that wind drowned out all music, and the congregation scattered in fear.

I have no idea how we got home from church. There are gaps in my memory over many of those years, and I think they are to keep me sane. What I do remember is her leaving the house a day or two later to shout at the wind to stop and to her God to grant respite. She died in the dust that day. They called it “dust pneumonia”. It took thousands.

Her death destroyed my father. He said that he could not stay in that place. He took what few items of value we had and me, and we travelled east. It was said that things were turning around, but in those times optimism was needed and my father was all out of that.

It seemed to him that all that he had were those few things and they were good for nothing except a stake into a game of chance. I think it was a card game of some kind, but I don’t know about such things. All I know was that once he was in, he needed more to stay in, and he decided to gamble my life away.

“This is my son, Hart, and he has a voice that must be the sound of the angels. Sing something, son.”

It was some squalid bar somewhere and the men staring at me seemed angry and evil, but when I sang, I could see that they were affected by it. My father was allowed to stay in for the contest, when everything was laid on the table. I don’t doubt that he thought he would win. He even winked at me. But then I watched as his face drained of color to an expression of horror. He had now lost everything, including me.

Somebody offered him a gun, perhaps as a joke. But he took it and stepped outside and shot himself in the head. At that point I had no mother, no father, no belongings and only an owner.

It was December 6, 1935 – exactly 70 years since slavery had been abolished in the United States. There was supposed to be no such thing, but it was not like I had any right to say that. I knew what my position was. Another had assumed the responsibility for my welfare, and that was sorely needed.

His name was Philip Mansfield, and he was not a good man. But he liked the sound of my voice, and he knew others did too. For Philip, it was simply a question of turning my voice into money.

It wasn’t long before one of his friends pointed out that his investment would soon turn from gold to lead. I was a boy, and then 13 years old. Within a year or so my voice would break and then I would be worth nothing. But, if you want to keep a boy a soprano, then something has to go.

I could weep a river for what happened next, but it started with Philip reaching out to me and promising me his care and attention, and these were things that I had never really had. There was pain, but no great realization. It was not until he decided that my voice would be worth more if it came out of the mouth of a woman, that everything changed.

In those days Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin were writing great music, and jazz and swing orchestras like the Glenn Miller Band and many others, engaged female singers, some of them not even named. I had been brought up on church music including operatic arias of a religious nature, but my mother loved my versions of Shirley Temple songs. The new influences were from Latino and black music, and for soprano voices that meant Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Philip liked this kind of music.

“Heart sounds like a girl’s name anyway,” he said. “You could be Heart Mansfield, maybe my niece. You could give some of this great black music a white face.”

Being the kind of man he was, Phil had me sign up to a contract. I had only just turned 14 but he had arranged fake documents to say that I was 18 and born a woman.

I had no idea how to pretend to be a woman, let alone live as one without a break, but that was to be my role in life. But “show business”, if you can call what I did that, introduces you to plenty of models. I met so many people who were only pretending to be the people they were on stage. I learned to develop an onstage personality which began as a humble farm girl (explaining my lack of etiquette) on to a more sophisticated woman of the world.

My hair grew long, and I kept it styled, and I started to do things like shaping my eyebrows like the actresses in the new movies coming out, particularly the musicals. There was always plenty of demand for a small band to open up in a large bar or a small dance hall, playing the music of the time with a woman who looked like she could have stepped straight out of Hollywood, singing all of the popular songs sung by a woman.

Did I look like a Hollywood star? I certainly tried. I think that there was still something of the look of a man about me, in the face and with the broad shoulders and slim hips, but it was a good look. People told me that I was unmistakably me, and then when I started singing, I was unforgettable too.

I suppose that I felt that I had fallen on my feet, after having suffered so much as a young child. By the time I came to understand the enormity of what Philip had done to me I was almost ready to forgive him. I could never live a normal person’s life. I would never have a partner to be with me, but I could find joy in what I did, and the pleasure it gave to others.

But then, to make matters even better, Josiah Coombs came into my life. It was Christmas 1941 and he had been in the audience, and he wanted to meet me after the show. He was not the first to ask, or even the first to hear me agree, although I did not do that often. It is just that a singer feeds on appreciation, and sometimes that calls for a little more than applause.

I had assumed that with the loss of my sex, I would not feel attracted to any woman and certainly not to a man, but I found Josiah to be something very different. There was a look in his eyes that told me that he would do anything for me, anything at all. I challenge anybody not to be affected by a look like that. It was just that I knew that as soon as he found out my dreadful secret it would be over. But I told myself that we would then part and that would be that, whether I liked him or not.

Still, it seemed like it would be the hardest thing that I ever had to do – to watch his adoration turn to hate. But it needed to be done because he was kissing me and reaching for more.

“I can’t do that, Josiah,” I said to him.

“I understand,” he said. “I apologize. You are not that sort of gal. I should have known better. I am so sorry for pushing it as far as I did.

“No, Josiah, I mean it is not that I don’t want to, I just can not do it,” I said. “It is not that I am not that sort of gal – I am not any sort of gal at all.” And I showed him the padding where my breasts should be.

The look on his face was not disappointment. It was a look I had seen on my father’s face when that last crop failed. It was like the world had collapsed under him. I just cried and cried, and to my surprise he put his arms around me and held me tight.

“I am joining the army after Christmas day,” he said. “I am going to war for my country wherever they send me. A soldier needs a gal to write. Will you let me write you, Heart?”

Yes, we were at war, and mothers, wives and girlfriends did their duty as well, waving goodbye to sons, husbands and boyfriends. I did my part as a patriotic woman, even if I wasn’t one.

I gave him a lock of my hair, and I wrote my first letter only an hour after he was gone, telling him to stay safe and come home to me. Of course, it was not just for him, but something he could show his buddies in barracks. “This is my sweetheart – she’s a singer – with a voice like an angel.” He would come back and find a real girl, but he had that letter and a stage photo with it.

People still needed music in those times, and Philip found work for me in and around army camps and in war bond shows when they started to appear. I was busy, but I still found time to write Josiah. I told him that he didn’t have to reply – just win the war and come home.

At some stage I looked at signing up to join the army myself. I actually went into a recruiting office with my hair up under a hat and showed them my birth certificate.

“Son, you don’t look like your balls have dropped yet,” the recruiter told me. When I told him that I didn’t have any, he just shook his head. “We’re only looking for men,” he said.

I took my hat off so that my hair tumbled out and I said – “Well what about the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps then?”

There was no place for me. It was not patriotism or a death wish, it was just that I wanted to escape Philip Mansfield. He was becoming more demanding, and it was becoming clear to me that rather than being his niece, I was his slave. I was looking for a way out and I finally got my chance when the USO came calling.

The United Service Organizations Inc. was established on the request of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 as a nonprofit organization to provide live entertainment to United States troops. It was a curious mixture of religious groups but it soon realized that the show business world was the best to provide the leadership and bring in the talent. I was one of the 5,000 entertainers called upon to bring their talent to the service of our country.

Philip was contacted and keen to be involved, but that was not how USO worked. The contract was personal with a weekly wage and all expenses covered for regular performers - real celebrities were paid a modest daily rate but received good publicity. It was not a show that could be turned down, and I took it eagerly. Nobody was concerned about what was (or was not) between my thighs, and I was free of Philip at last.

Our own troupe performed around the states at first, performing in army camps and towns where military families were invited to attend. It was not until 1942 that we received our first mission overseas, being sent to Australia to entertain troops there.

My task was mainly to sing, mostly in the chorus but stepping forward for special songs that displayed the beauty of my voice. I was totally accepted as being “one of the girls” and sometimes that was all that was expected of me. The truth is that the closer we got to a real fighting war, the more the boys simply looked forward to having pretty girls around, just to look at and sometimes to dance with. It was an important thing, and this was how I was serving my nation.

It was while I was in Australia that I got the message that Josiah was dead, or rather missing presumed dead. I was heartbroken, but in a way I felt that being his girl had been a gift to him and to the nation he served, even though it was nothing more than a dream. His death meant that his return into the arms of a woman who was not a woman, could not happen, and that was just as well.

But it was while I was in Australia that I met Ralph (Rosie) Dyer, another armed forces entertainer from New Zealand. I was down at the time and she could see that, and maybe she could see what I was. She came over to be with me – another man dressed as a woman.

Her troupe was called “The Concert Party” and unlike all the others it was actually a troop – a serving army unit. The entertainers had seen action on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean and had to abandon their costumes and four of their players to capture. Rosie got away “to fight on, on another stage”. She appeared to be a woman, just as I did, although she was primarily a comedian and dancer. She was exempt from cutting her hair and never wore military uniforms, but she was a real soldier.

“It doesn’t matter what you have below the belt,” she told me. “A woman is a woman regardless of whether she is tall or short, fat or thin, bulged or flush. If you want a man then you just need to find one who loves who you are, not what shape you are.” She made me feel that I was not alone. She made me feel as if I could find love, even as I was.

She had a way of sniffing out people like me, and herself, I suppose. She found another in my own troupe – Claude was a fiddle player in the band who wanted nothing more than to live life as a woman. That was not quite my history, but I had come around to the conclusion that this was to be my future. I appeared to be a woman and acted as one, and now it seemed clear that I was attracted to men just as they were attracted to me. Claudette and I became firm friends and I helped her to carefully develop her female side so that she was ready for a dramatic sideshow costume change when the time arrived. For those managing us the only question was how good a fiddle player she was.

We headed home in 1943 and it was Claudette who gave me that news that only the year before a new drug had gone on the market in the USA called Premarin, otherwise known as PMU from “Pregnant Mare Urine” being as it came from that. She said that she had a prescription “to bring on female puberty” and I should do that same.

This drug seemed like a miracle. Imagine a drug that, over time, could turn a man’s body into that of a woman, save for the sexual organs. In my case the absence of a part of those only made it more effective on me. At last I could have breasts, and even their slow arrival and ripening was a joy.

The USO was very active back home in 1943 and 1944. We supported the sale of war bonds and did our best to encourage the families of servicemen overseas who had perhaps expected their boys home earlier than the two or more years they had been absent. We performed with gusto, but I played a lesser role. My voice suited classical songs and the more doleful ballads of love at a distance which did not suit the mood of these concerts. Still, by this time I was a fixture and enjoying some personal popularity.

Then in 1944 several troupes were packed off to England to support the liberation of France. We initially performed in England but we were then sent on to the continent for our first show there. I actually heard that one of the units at our concert there was the very same unit that had included my very own Josiah Coombs. They had been moved from Italy to assist in the taking of Southern France in what was called “Operation Dragoon”. I decided that I would seek out the officer who had been his Commanding Officer to find out how he had died.

“Sergeant Coombs – a mighty fine soldier,” he said. “Dead? No, not dead but very badly injured. We had to abandon him during a tactical withdrawal, but we got word later that he received treatment from the enemy and he survived. He was unable to walk so he wasn’t able to escape with the others, so he must have been taken off to Germany. Be patient, Miss, we should have this won by Christmas.”

Of course, that did not happen, which left me longer to worry. How badly hurt was he?

I kept busy in liberated France, still living closely with Claudette who could speak French. I learned some French songs and we even did an act on stage for violin and voice. Even when most of the troupe left to go home for Christmas we stayed on with just a few, to keep doing what we did.

The war dragged on through the winter and the German counter offensives and it was not until May 8 1945 that the war finally ended. When it did, I was in Germany with a small contingent of USO performers. I had stayed in touch with Josiah’s CO and it was he who called me to say that my man had been found. He told me that if I could get to Ludwigsburg he would pick me up and bring me to him.

Josiah was totally surprised to see me. Why wouldn’t he be? His CO had not mentioned me until I walked in with him. I just went over to his bedside and dropped to my knees, holding his hand and sobbing.

“Don’t ever leave me again,” I said to him.

“I am told that I will walk again, but you need to know that I am not a complete man anymore,” he said.

“And I’m not a complete woman, either,” I whispered. “But I have a couple of big surprises in my blouse that may have you thinking otherwise.”

So we just had one another, and that was all we needed for the next 57 years, until he finally died, a very happy man with a very devoted wife.

As he liked to say, “the Heart will live on” and I guess he was right, at least for the time being.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2025

Authors Notes:

This is a story from my latest anthology of short stories published by Doppler Press on Amazon (and other platforms). "Timeless Romance" is another collection of period pieces but as the majority are 20th century I thought that this story, from an idea sent to me by Erin, was a good example.

Erin’s Seed: “Set in the depression era, a drunken gambling father loses his kid in a card game. The kid has a golden voice but a flush beats a full house - the father then blows his brains out. Phil, the winner is baffled but takes the kid in tow, he would have taken a signed IOU. The kid is a boy but there are accidental and on purpose deceptions and the kid ends up as a headliner - a young girl singer named Heart. It's working great except the kid is at the age where his voice may break so steps are taken and Heart’s career moves on. She falls in love with a young man just before WWII breaks out, but he goes to war and disappears. Heart tries to enlist as her male self so she can go overseas but they won't take her for multiple reasons (castration, homosexuality) so she joins a USO show and gets to go to entertain the troops there she meets another young man who is very like her lost love. She hates it but she's falling in love again. So, the original guy can reappear? But he always wanted to be just like her - They both head home with husbands? He went into hiding and became a woman following Heart’s example.”

I have tried to stick close to everything in Erin’s suggestion but with an extra character so that the real love affair will shine through.

In researching troop entertainment troupes I came across the story about the 3 armed dragged queens fighting a rear guard action in a battle against German paratroopers in Crete. I think there is enough material there for a whole story in there!