by Susan Wilson
A knock on the door stops Keller from saying anything more. The capped and starched nurse leans in. “You can go in now.”
Keller stands up and offers his hand to Francesca.
Hers is warm, a little damp. “I can go in by myself.”
Keller steps back, letting Francesca go.
Chapter Seventy-three
I was gutted. Hollowed out. I looked down on my husband, who would not look at me. Was this the same man who had kept glancing up at me from the bull pen as I stood in the grandstand, cheering on the opposing team? The man who had smiled at me and I’d felt the electric charge of connection pass between us? I’d thought that we were two halves of the same whole. This was the man to whom I had committed my youth and my life, eyes wide open. The lover who had made me believe we knew each other so profoundly that we experienced everything as one. But we hadn’t. And my husband, my dearest, hadn’t trusted me with his shame, his self-condemnation. It was as if I didn’t know this man at all.
When he had arrived at Walter Reed, grievously wounded and so damaged, I was sent by the head nurse into a ward filled with other wounded soldiers. The massive room was cluttered with traction rigs, stainless-steel trollies, and simple curtains on frames rolled between beds. The antiseptic stench was pervasive in that ward, I fought against putting my hand to my nose. Every bed contained a ghost wrapped with the dead white of gauzy bandages, hiding missing eyes and protecting burned faces. They all looked the same, the mummification rendering the wounded into grotesque Kewpie dolls.
But I’d unerringly walked directly to Rick’s bed; the obscuring bandages unable to hide him from me. I’d known him out of all the disguised wounded. And now I looked at him, his scars so familiar that they no longer occurred to me, and I didn’t know him at all.
They would transfer him to the VA hospital once he was stabilized, and Rick would have to remain there until the doctors were confident that he wouldn’t try again.
* * *
They drive home in silence. What is there to say that isn’t obscenely mundane or too useless? They will eat leftovers; they will not ask questions that begin with the word why. When they pull into the driveway, Keller shuts the engine off and doesn’t move to get out.
Francesca pulls the door handle, swings open her door, but she stays seated. “You go in. I want to take a little walk by myself.”
Keller nods, willing to let her clear her head, hoping that when she comes back, she’ll let him know that she doesn’t hold him in contempt for keeping Rick’s confidence. He watches in the rearview mirror as Francesca starts down the sidewalk, the yellow of her sprigged dress too cheerful for the look of grief on her face. The warm day has turned gloomy; a heavy cloud lurks in the southeast.
Keller and Pax wait in the kitchen for Francesca to come home. He’s pulled out the leftover pot roast and potatoes and is slowly reheating them on the stove. He stirs, listens, stirs some more. The first strike of rain hits the kitchen window. “Come on, Pax. Let’s find her.” He shuts off the gas beneath the pot.
Keller wishes that he still had the flat leather service collar that told Pax he was on duty, but his words are enough to get the dog’s attention. “Seek.”
The dog doesn’t bolt; he casts slowly along the edge of the driveway, down to the sidewalk, turns left, then right, adjudging the depth of Francesca’s most recent scent against the one she might have left earlier in the day. It’s raining harder, and Keller wonders if the scent will be washed away before the dog can locate her. He unfurls the umbrella he snatched from the hall closet and repeats his command: “Seek.”
Pax drops his nose to the sidewalk and strikes the scent. They march off toward the beach, then take a sharp right, as if she’d changed her mind. The blocks aren’t perfectly shaped, and she’s left a trail of indecision and confusion. A blind alley, a narrow sidewalk with crumbling cement lifted by old trees and a decade of frost heaves. Back toward the beach. Keller despairs that they are going around in circles, like children playing around a tree. Catch me if you can. They come to a playground, where Pax breathes in the scent of her footprints impressed in the new mud forming at the swing set. Did she sit for a moment on these swings? Maybe lifted herself up like a girl again, allowing herself to feel the freedom of leaving the ground? Or just rocked gently back and forth?
* * *
Pax doesn’t mistake this “seek” for a game. The distress rising out of the fast-diluted scent powers him forward. She is in trouble. She is lost. Keller, the most rock steady of partners, is close to panic. Something has happened, and even a dog knows that it has something to do with what happened in Rick’s room. Rick is gone again and maybe Francesca has tried to find him. Humans have such inadequate noses. Why didn’t she call on him to help? Now she’s missing and it is becoming more challenging to discern the scent molecules that she’s left behind in her wake as they get closer to the shoreline and the rain beats down harder. Keller’s scent of worry almost obscures the faint tracery of her scent in the air. Pax pauses at the footprints, gathers a fresh sample of Francesca, and raises his head. She’s not far. He can hear her.
Pax nearly pulls Keller off his feet as he charges across the busy shore drive to the Squantum Yacht Club pier.
* * *
Francesca is drenched, but she leans against the wooden rail of the pier as if she’s standing there on a summer day, oblivious to the way her dress clings to her body. Even before he reaches her, Keller sees how violently she is shaking and he pulls off his shirt to cover her shoulders. “Come home, Francesca. Come home.”
She leans into him and he can see that the shaking is less from the chill of a late-spring rain than from the emotions that have driven her out here, staring down to the flat muddy shingle at low tide fifteen feet below the narrow pier.
Pax, quarry located, stands at her knees and pushes himself against her so that she moves away from the rail.
Francesca offers no resistance as Keller wraps his arm around her and the three walk the most direct way back home. The umbrella over their heads affords the illusion of intimacy as they walk through this neighborhood. A shelter for their shared distress. Keller is the one shivering now, but he isn’t cold. His muscles twitch with unexpressed tension.
* * *
Keller carries her upstairs as if she’s his bride. Francesca is impassive, but she closes her eyes as he towels her hair, her face, her neck; gives a little moan as he unbuttons her soaking dress and rubs her shoulders. He wraps the bath towel around her and makes her sit so that he can remove her shoes. He slides a hand underneath her slip to unlock the mystery of garters and carefully peels off her wet nylons. He holds her icy feet in his hands and, in a spontaneous and natural gesture, lowers his lips to kiss them.
She breathes in sharply, as if awakening from a dream. Francesca takes his wet hair in both hands and forces his head up. And she kisses him.
Chapter Seventy-four
At his insistence, Rick has been gotten out of bed and is sitting in the small hospital solarium. This wheelchair is hospital-issue and he feels as though he is higher up than usual. The orderly tucked an extra pillow behind him, so he’s also more upright, as if one half of his body is at attention. He doesn’t want Francesca to find him slumped and defeated. He wants her to believe that his attempt wasn’t the act of a weak man, but of a decisive one. This is one failure for which he will take full responsibility, and for which he is sorry. Whether or not he is sorry for having tried or sorry for having failed will depend on the look on her face when she comes into this relentlessly sunny room.
The orderly has faced Rick toward the window, with its view of nothing more than the sky. There is no one else in the solarium with him, no obligation to make forced conversation, no contention for the better magazines. There is a clock on the wall, a pie-size Timex with an audible tick as the second hand moves in a persistent sweep around the face, counting off the minutes as Rick waits for Francesca. Official visiting hours don’t start for an ho
ur, but he expects her at any moment, although he can’t say why he thinks Francesca will defy the rules.
Keller will bring her. He won’t let her come alone. Keller, who has become so important to them—to him, to her. From a shy and nearly mute helper, Keller has been transformed into a friend. Nonetheless, Rick is hoping that for once Keller won’t come along with Francesca. He really needs time alone with her, not like the hours they spend closeted in his room, but quality time. Time enough to say what he needs to say, tell her the truth about what happened in the Italian mountains; to beg her forgiveness. He can’t do that with an audience. Keller may have a stake in this, but Rick has to rebuild his life with Francesca from the ground up.
Gradually, he’d been lifted out of his dreamless narcotic sleep into a dream-filled slumber in which he saw her fading away like a ghost, an ethereal revenant of the happy-go-lucky girl she was before his transformation from luckiest man on earth to this wreck of a man. As long as she’s believed that he is a casualty of war, not of ego, she’s been tied to him by a love that has been refined into admiration and devotion from the fire of passion. But if she knows the truth, how long will she want to be tied down to a vainglorious idiot? How strong is love when there is nothing more than marital duty framing it?
All too often lately he hears her laughing with Keller, hears that girlish trill that he no longer teases out of her. Keller makes Francesca happy. She deserves happiness.
Rick begins to cry. He doesn’t want to lose Francesca; she is everything to him. His life. More important than any loss—limb, mobility, career, even Pax—losing her would kill him. But she has to know the truth. And that may drive her away.
* * *
My husband heard me come into the solarium, the click of my heels on the linoleum loud in that otherwise-silent room. His back was to me, but he sat up straighter and I watched him raise his hand to wipe his face, so I knew that he had been weeping. Those tears broke my heart. Then I was at his side, kneeling, touching his hand, and fumbling in my purse for my handkerchief. “It’s all right, my darling, it’s all right.”
“I have to tell you something.”
“No. You don’t. I know and it’s all right.”
“Keller told you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s my story to tell.”
“He needed to help me understand why you … why you did what you did.”
“Where is he?”
And that was when I began to cry.
* * *
I awoke that morning to meet the pure light of a spring day and the certainty that Keller had to go. We had not succumbed. I kissed him and tasted his desire like thirst rising up to be quenched. Like mine had been in those early days of Rick’s courtship, when we resolved it was best to get married rather than burn, when burn to me meant with unsatisfied desire, not the fires of hell. With his kiss, Keller instigated the memory of that old unrequited passion; his mouth and fingers ignited the fire of my physical desire, which had been tamped down for so long by circumstance of war and wounds. I wanted him. As I had wanted my husband from the first.
And it was the thought of Rick that stopped me.
“No. We can’t.”
“Francesca.” His voice was deep with the words pressing to get out. “I love you.”
“Keller. No. You can’t.”
“I do.” Keller Nicholson was an honorable man. A good man. He gently released me and kissed my cheek. “But you love Rick.”
“Yes. No matter what’s happened, or what he did, he’s my husband.”
Keller picked up his forgotten shirt from the floor. “I love him, too, Francesca. I do.”
* * *
Rick would be gone for weeks, or even months. Keller no longer had a purpose in our house. We would be dancing around each other, alone except for the dog. It wasn’t concern for what the neighbors might say. Not at all. After all, he could rent a room somewhere else for the duration. It was that I wasn’t sure I had the moral fortitude to have Keller so close. He’d poured his heart out in those three little words and I didn’t know if I was strong enough to resist temptation—and afraid that someday I might take what comfort he offered. I could never forsake Rick, so all that Keller would ever have of me would be far less than what he wanted. Keller could never have my love.
So I said the words that effectively broke everyone’s heart. “Keller, it’s time for you to go.”
* * *
“Where’s Keller? And Pax? What happened?” Rick hands Francesca back the handkerchief.
“I’ve asked him to leave. You’re going to be away for a while and there’s no reason for him to stick around.”
Away. Rick appreciates Francesca’s euphemism for being committed to the psychiatric ward of the VA hospital. He appreciates her sense of fair play for Keller. But there is something more at stake than Keller. “Fran, what about Pax?”
She bursts into tears again, this time gasping and inconsolable. “I don’t know.”
She is on her knees, her head in his lap, and he strokes her curls, not like he strokes Pax, for the comfort he gets from touching the dog, but in order to comfort his wife, who has effectively given the dog away.
Rick pulls Francesca into his lap, wraps his arms around her, and kisses her with all the passion of a capable man. There is something that she isn’t telling him, and that’s all right. In the end, he will never speak to her of his grievous mistake in the mountains in Italy and she will never speak of the real reason she has sent Keller away.
Rick holds his wife and is amazed at how good it feels.
Chapter Seventy-five
It doesn’t take long to stuff his duffel bag. Fold up the cot. Find his textbooks, his Morte d’Arthur. Packed up in minutes, Keller tosses everything into the backseat of his car, leaving the lamp and the chair. Into the ammo box he shoves a few of the tools he’s bought—a hand drill, a screwdriver, a hammer. He can’t find his winter coat, then remembers hanging it in the hall closet. All the time Keller packs, Pax is at his side, worried, making little grumbling sounds in his throat.
He’s made a grave mistake, a life-changing mistake, in touching her last night and now she wants him to leave. They no longer need him. With Rick away for an undetermined period, Keller is free to go. Free to go. That’s what she said. Free. He’s never felt less free in his life.
“I’m sorry for what happened. I won’t let it happen again,” he told her, ashamed at the pleading in his voice.
Francesca looked at him with weary eyes. “Keller, it’s time.”
“What will you tell Rick?”
“That it was time.” She didn’t offer him breakfast; she was leaving to see Rick. It was too early for visiting hours, but she needed to go. Unspoken but implied: Be gone when I get back.
Hurt has evolved into anger. Fine, he’ll go, but he’s goddamned going to take Pax with him. He’s going to do what he should have done in the beginning, packed the dog into his car and kept moving. Avoided all this unhappiness. If this is love, who needs it? If this is what loving friends does for you, screw it.
Going through to the kitchen, Keller spots Pax’s bowls. His leash is hanging on the breezeway doorknob. He snatches them up, puts the bowls in the ammo box and hangs the leash like a bandolier around his torso. In the hallway, his winter coat reclaimed, Keller sees Pax’s squeaky mouse on the top of the hallway table. He shoves it in his pants pocket. Then he notices that the drawer in the hallway table is pulled out slightly askew. The June humidity is oppressive and the drawer in the hall table is stuck cockeyed and half-open. For some reason, this enrages him and he pounds it with the heel of his hand to set it straight. Nothing moves, so Keller gives it a good yank to pull it open. The whole drawer flies out of the table and everything in it falls to the floor. Sheets of ecru writing paper scatter, along with a fountain pen, pencils, and a boxful of paper clips. A date book embossed with 1942 falls open, facedown. Keller gathers the objects, and when he picks up the forgotten date book,
three photographs fall out.
Francesca and Rick at the Totem Pole Ballroom, grinning into the camera. They both look so young, so happy. The second photograph is of Pax sitting on the top step of a porch, his long forelegs on the next step down. Even in this black-and-white photograph, his color is brighter, sharper than it is now.
Keller looks at the last photograph. Someone, maybe Sid, has taken a family portrait. Francesca and Rick stand side by side on the porch steps. It is winter and they are wearing dress coats, perhaps on their way out to some party. It is so strange to see Rick standing up. Keller is a little surprised to see how tall he is beside Francesca, as if she’s shrunk. She’s looking up at him, instead of him looking, as he does now, up at her. The look on her face is worried love. Pax stands between them, his eyes, too, on Rick.
Francesca and Rick and Pax. Keller flips the photograph over and reads the inscription: On our way to the station. March 1942. Smiles fake.
Out of the depths comes the memory of seeing that couple and their dog on the station platform. And then it hits him: Rick and Francesca were the couple he saw at South Station that cold winter afternoon when he, too, was on his way to war. He sees again the man embracing the dog before he does his wife, but now he is Rick and the woman is Francesca. He remembers the dog forcing the crowd away from her. Protective. Pax. The little family that would never include anyone else.
The truth isn’t a mallet hitting Keller over the head. It is more insidious, a wraith of smoke burning up through his gut into his bloodstream. Whatever he and Pax have had, Pax was and always will be their dog.
He takes the black-and-white photograph of Pax and puts all the rest of it away in the drawer.
Chapter Seventy-six
Keller is gone and Pax knows deep in his heart that he won’t be working with him again. There was something so different about this leave-taking. Not just the packing but the heavy aura of completion, too. Something was finished, over.