by Beau North
“Take care, D!” he called, waving. The train started moving.
“Richie!” Darcy sprinted after the train. “Be careful!”
He might have said something else, but it was swallowed up with the sounds of the train rattling on its tracks, taking him away from his life and toward a new and uncertain future.
Later, he would work out what it was that Darcy said. Expendable, my ass.
March 4, 1942
Dear Richie,
Sorry to hear that Florida is, as you so charmingly called it “a bug and snake infested hell hole.” No, I don’t remember ever seeing a palmetto bug but now that I’ve heard you describe it in such rich detail, I’m sure I never want to.
Georgie is fine, thank you for asking, and I’m fine too. The factories will be up and running soon. I can’t say where in a letter for obvious reasons, but there will be a lot of jobs to fill thanks to you.
You might be interested (or knowing you, outraged) to hear that George has upped and left. You were right. He took the money and ran, but I couldn’t not give him his inheritance. Dad was fond of him, after all. He might not be the lost cause you think he is. I hope he isn’t. Maybe that makes me a sucker, but maybe he wanted to do things on his own terms. I don’t think either one of us could begrudge him that.
Sending you love from G and have mine while you’re at it.
Will
Fisk, fisk, fisk. The sound of the brush against his boots was monotonous, soothing. Richard reckoned if it weren’t for the odor of boot polish, he could have fallen asleep mid-fisk, but the polish stunk to high heaven. Outside, the rain was pouring down in buckets. Richard had been headed back to the barracks after coming off duty and was outside long enough to get soaked. Ordinarily, he didn’t mind getting caught out in the rain. On a hot, muggy day, it could be refreshing, but, when the sky had opened up and started pouring water, he was disappointed yet again. The rain was warm as a bath.
Don’t think about baths. Richard was silently coming to terms with the spartan life of a soldier. He rather liked the camaraderie that came from being equal to the men beside him. His wealth and privilege gave him no advantages here, any achievements he earned were done so on his own merits. But he did miss things like whiskey, baths, and women. Especially women. Nightly he dreamt of their soft skin and silky sighs, their sweet perfumes. Richard missed the way a woman’s eyes would light up at one of his carefully chosen remarks, missed watching a blush creep over a woman’s face at a few words whispered in her ear. He adored women. Not just the pleasure they brought, but everything they were, everything they did. Perhaps it was losing his mother at such a young age that had given him his affinity for women. He didn’t like to ponder that possibility too much.
“Chrissake, Fitz, ya think that boot is polished yet?”
Richard startled at the sound of Adam Carter’s braying Boston accent next to him. Carter was a short, slim man with a talent for stealth when he wasn’t speaking. Richard had watched Carter cross a room wearing seventy pounds of gear without making a single sound.
“Or did you get caught up looking at your reflection, pretty boy?” This came from two bunks down, from Mateo Bertram, whose Louisiana accent was nearly unintelligible even to Richard’s ears. Like Richard, Teo had come from an old and venerable family, but there their similarities ceased. Teo’s family had fallen on desperate times, still living in their ramshackle colonial in Louisiana as every year the swamp crept closer and closer, reclaiming the home’s antebellum grandeur floor by floor. Of all the men in their unit, Teo Bertram and Richard Fitzwilliam liked each other the least.
“What else am I going to look at, your ugly mug?” Richard felt the heat of irritation prickle the back of his neck.
“Cram it, both of you,” Carter snapped.
Richard looked up to retort but fell silent when he saw the imposing shadow of the chief standing in the door to their barrack, rain-soaked with water still dripping from the tip of his bulbous nose. He put his hands on his hips, his stern expression never wavering.
“Carter, Bert, take a hike.”
Not wanting to be told twice, Carter and Teo beat a hasty retreat, neither looking back as the screen door groaned shut behind them.
Richard felt the walls closing in on him. A one-on-one with the chief couldn’t be good news, and the stern expression on the older man’s face carried a hint of regret. He approached Richard, removing a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket. A typed telegram.
He couldn’t pull his eyes from that folded square of paper. It became huge in his eyes as the chief continued to approach him with deliberate steps.
“No.” His voice sounded very faint to his ears. He hated this feeling. If he could have taken his knife and cut out his weakness, his heart, he would have.
“I don’t want it.”
The chief put the telegram in his hand, a glimmer of kindness in his hard, blue eyes.
“Son, I’m sorry.”
May 1942
O’Dell’s Tavern
Starke, Florida
Even in the dim belly of the tavern, surrounded by whirring fans, the air was almost too thick to breathe. Richard hated Florida, but the whiskey was helping him forget that. He intended to drink enough so that he even forgot his own damnable name. The little fox-faced woman behind the bar approached him with a bottle in her hand as if she read his mind.
“Another drink, soldier?”
“Please.” He pushed his glass forward. “Is it that obvious?”
“This is the closest watering hole to Camp Blanding for twenty miles,” she said as she poured another two fingers of whiskey in his glass with a tidy twist of her wrist. “The haircut gives it away.”
She walked off, leaving him to his drink in peace. Richard took the opportunity to take the telegram out of his pocket. The paper was limp from being handled so much and badly creased from his pocket. He could still read what it said better than he would like.
The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your brother, James Aaron Fitzwilliam, Lieutenant, USNR, was killed in action in the performance of his duty and in the service to his country…
Richard didn’t need to read past that. In the two days since receiving the telegram, he memorized the regrets therein. He received a second telegram from his father, but he had thrown that one away unopened. With James gone, he and his father no longer had anything to say to each other. He carefully refolded the telegram, thinking of the last thing his brother said to him the day he left. See you in the funny papers, kid. Richard didn’t think this was what James had in mind.
“Bad news?” Fox-face had returned with her lovely bottle.
Richard nodded. “As bad as it comes.”
She turned and took a different bottle down from the top shelf and poured two glasses, handing one to him.
“I keep this around for the big brass that comes in from time to time. On the house.”
“Much obliged.” He saluted her. They drank. He expected Kentucky bourbon, but the drink went down smoother than silk, it’s smoky, peaty flavor more delicate than any bourbon he favored. He wiped his mouth.
“Macallan?”
The barmaid nodded. “Aged thirty years.”
Richard wasn’t surprised. It was the admiral’s favorite drink. It seemed that the living were as determined to haunt him as the dead.
“Who’d you lose?” She nodded at the telegram.
“Brother. You?”
“Husband.” Fox-face pointed to a framed portrait hanging behind the bar of a sleepy-eyed man with a grin that just seemed to be hovering on the edge of a joke. He had a likable face.
“Name’s Rita,” she said. It was hard to tell in the dim bar, but Richard thought she might have actually blushed a little. He took her outstretched hand and gave it a little shake.
“Pleasure, Rita. I’m James.”
Richard couldn’t say why he lied. He thought in his own way he was keeping James alive through him. James Fitzwi
lliam would taste one more drink, touch one more woman. It was Richard’s own little revenge against the cruel passage of time. This moment for him was closer to his brother’s life than the next would be.
He pushed away from the bar, wanting very much to be out from under her considering gaze.
“Is there a payphone here, Rita?”
“Over in the back. Past the pool tables.”
Richard found it easily enough. After giving the operator his instructions, he soon had Darcy’s voice in his ear.
“Richie, is that you?”
“Hullo, D. How’s tricks?”
“Jesus, Richie. We got the word about James.”
Richard felt like a stone that had been dropped into a well—nothing but sinking darkness and the pressure of waiting to hit bottom.
“Is Georgie okay?” It seemed like the safest thing he could ask.
Darcy sighed. “No, but that’s not surprising. We both loved James like a brother.”
“I know.”
Silence fell between them. Richard couldn’t even say why he’d called Darcy. Maybe to ask how he was supposed to feel. Of everyone he knew, he thought Darcy would know. But when it came down to it, Richard couldn’t make the words.
“Do you have leave? Are you coming home?”
Home? What home was there for him now? Annapolis? Not likely. Pemberley? That was Darcy’s home, not his. Where do I belong now? The phone call had been a mistake. “No, I’ve got a few days, but I won’t be coming back.”
“He was the best of all of us, you know.”
Richard knew they were supposed to be words of comfort, but they made him irrationally angry. He didn’t need the likes of Will Darcy to tell him how good James had been.
James, who had been mor of a parent to Richard than his own father.
James, who would forgive any sin whether it was repented or not.
“Look, D, I gotta go,” Richard said hastily. “Give Georgie my love, will ya?”
“Richie, wait!” Richard hung up, cutting Darcy off. He made his way back where Rita was wiping the bar with a rag. The only other person in the place was a man in yellowing cook’s whites, who sat listening to the Cubs game on an aging Philco.
Richard gave Rita a questioning look. He wanted to take her to bed. Not because she was pretty—no, he’d had much prettier. Perhaps he recognized the same sad desperation in her that he felt. It wouldn’t be anything as easy as sex. He knew that he would fuck her until they were nothing but a quivering tangle of limbs, until they weren’t even people but animals, spitting into the face of Death itself.
He didn’t let his face hide what he was thinking. She eyed him carefully, finally throwing her bar rag at the cook.
“Keep an eye on the place, Eugene. I’m taking a break.”
5
BEN
May 12, 2002
Fitzwilliam House
Annapolis
They slept. Ben couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so well as he did with her tucked up against him. Keisha was awake before he was. He plodded into the kitchen, greeted by the smell of fresh coffee.
“You are an angel,” he said, pouring himself a cup. She smiled over the rim of her mug.
“I can make coffee, but I don’t cook.”
He put his hand on the back of her neck, pulling her to him and planting a kiss on her forehead. Her skin was warm and fragrant and silky soft. “Good morning.”
She leaned into him, her head coming to rest on his shoulder. “Good morning to you.”
He was only too happy to make breakfast for her: frittatas and hash browns and fresh fruit. “I took cooking classes last summer,” he explained. He loved watching the surprise on her face melt into pleasure as she bit into her frittata.
“So, now that you’ve slept on it, do you have any clues as to who the mystery woman might be?” she asked between bites.
“A few, and I’m not sure either possibility is going to end in puppies and hugs.”
Keisha’s brows climbed up her forehead. “Don’t be cynical,” she scolded. Ben couldn’t help himself. He reached down and put his arms around her shoulders, pulling her in for a quick kiss before explaining his trepidation.
“I’m just saying families like mine have more skeletons than most. Things may come out that will make me think of them differently. Might even make you think differently of me.”
“Not likely, but, if you have anything you want to tell me, now would be the time.”
Ben sighed. “Did my dad ever tell you about my mom?” Keisha shook her head, curls nodding with the motion. He wanted to reach out and touch it, but remembered from some of the girls in his old office that touching a woman’s hair was breaking a cardinal rule of some sort. And what if she didn’t want to have her hair touched? He sometimes wondered how women could stand the lack of bodily autonomy men assumed with them. It was something his mother had pointed out to him when he was very young. She hated to be touched by strange men, even a gentle palm on the back or hand at her elbow when opening doors. She didn’t even like to be helped out of taxis.
“Hello? You awake, Ben?”
He brought his attention back to present. Keisha was looking at him with her rich brown eyes and lips curved up in a curious smile. Some mechanism deep in his chest moved, and a door that had been sealed shut for as long as he could remember seemed to spring open. Ben loved the look of her, loved her air of quiet calm and sanity. It was all he could do not to lay himself at her feet and let himself turn to stone there. An immortal memorial of a mortal fool.
Instead he plucked his wallet from off the counter where he’d left it the night before, along with his keys. He took out a black and white photo of two women, one with light hair and a round face. The other woman was brown-haired, slim, with high cheekbones; her perfect cupid’s bow lips curved into a small, secret smile. Ben pointed to her first.
“That’s my aunt Anne. She’s actually my second cousin, but I’ve always known her as aunt.” He pointed to the other woman. “And this is my mother, Charlotte. They’ve been together for fifty-three years. When my mom wanted to have a baby, it was Dad that stepped up to the plate.”
Keisha pursed her lips, brows raised. “So that’s what you meant when you said they never married?”
Ben nodded. “Pretty weird, even for this family.”
She handed the photo back to him. “He gave you his name.”
“He was my father in all the usual ways.”
“It sounds like you were very loved. You’re luckier than most, weird or not.”
“You’re not ready to run off?”
Keisha smiled. “What did I say, Fancy Man?”
Ben cast his wallet aside in favor of lifting her up in his arms, carrying her to the table. Their mouths met, tangled. His senses flooded with her, and the smells of him that she carried on her lips, on her skin. Hips ground against hips in ancient rhythms, breaths caught, exchanged, given back and forth as two shapes merged, melted into something newly born, waiting to be given name. Perhaps the name was Love.
Ben’s kisses traveled past the soft territory of her mouth, the peaks of her breasts, down the firm plane of her torso, glorying in the thin sounds of her yearning sighs. He sank to his knees before her, feeling like he was finally home at last.
Later, after a shower that took longer than most showers would, they dressed and stood on the front steps, wondering how to part ways.
“I’d like to see you again,” Ben said, caressing her face with the pad of his thumb.
“Then you’ll see me again. Besides, I’m not ready to say goodbye to those letters yet.”
He grinned and leaned down to kiss her. He felt dizzy—drunk on her. “Typical. Falling in love with my dad.”
She laughed and leaned her forehead against his chest for a moment before looking back up at him, her eyes serious.
“I don’t think I need to tell you that this was fun. It was fun, but for me it was…”
“
Special,” he finished her thought with one of his own. “For me, too.”
She took a deep breath, exhaled in a rush. “I’m glad it’s not just me.”
“It’s not just you. I like you, Keisha Barnes. More than I’ve liked anyone in a long time.”
He watched as she walked back to her cruiser, waving as she pulled out of the drive and onto the street, out into the glorious spring day. Ben stretched his arms and went back inside, feeling the watchful silence settle on his shoulders when the door closed. He walked past the office, its door now firmly shut lest a stray breeze undo Keisha’s careful organization.
Rather than return to the letters, Ben busied himself washing breakfast dishes and tidying the house. The cleaning service still came by periodically, but Ben enjoyed the simple zen of housework. With his hands busy dusting, sweeping, and vacuuming, his mind was free to wander to Keisha, the future, and inevitably, to the past, and the stacks of papers in the next room. Ben knew, somehow, that secrets long buried would see the light for the first time in decades and wondered how his father would feel about it. He decided he didn’t care. He’d only thrown out the idea that he was back to write a book, but the more he’d thought about it, the more sense it made. He could banish the shadows that hung over the Fitzwilliam name by shining a light on it. The letters alone were a treasure trove of American history, spanning two wars at least, the postwar boom. And now they were at war once again. His father’s words could bridge the past and present.
But there would be complications, legal questions to consider. Ben went back to his room (it really was his room now), dug his address book out of the nightstand and looked up a number he hadn’t called in years. He punched it into his address book to save it before hitting the green call button on his Nokia.
“Yes?” A crisp, female voice answered.
“Maggie Darcy?”
“Who should I say is calling?” the voice asked.
“This is Ben Fitzwilliam, her cousin.”