She found that she could see through people, through skin to skeleton. The tracing of their bones was as clear to her eyes as to an X-ray. She counted their ribs; she watched their stomachs churn food, the coiled intestines contracting and pulsing, like worms through the ground; she studied the flow of blood through veins and arteries like small canals. Faces lost their features and sockets their eyes; skulls looked back at her. She lifted her own arm and a skeleton hand appeared, purified of skin and muscle, only the enduring bone.
There were signs too. Of the Virgin, the Immaculate Conception, blue gown and naked foot on the curled serpent. Bare foot that moved, drew back. Half smile that flickered for an instant on the pink-and-white face. Crown of stars that shone a little brighter and then dimmed. The serpent that solemnly and sleepily winked.
Other signs. The shadows. Sometimes she thought they were people she recognized—she’d known them a long time ago; she couldn’t quite bring back their faces hidden there in the dark. … And sometimes the shadows were animals—no, they were almost animals. But not really. They weren’t anything but they were there. …
Robert’s letter: “You killed him. You let him die.” She tore it into small pieces; she put it in the fireplace, burned it, and stirred the ashes.
We are all guilty, she thought; all the two-legged people tottering and strutting on the crust of the earth. We never know what we do, never know what sin. All of us. Even Anthony. The lovely lost boy. All the forked creatures, stripped and naked. What did we do? The round white skull, skin and hair over it, camouflage. Circle of white bone, bottle of bone. Inside, the nameless horrors. That no prayer or incense dispels. Thoughts like worms before the grave.
She was dead, she was dying, she was alive. The shapes faded, the bells ceased, the flickering invisible candles turned back to air.
THE WAR ended with a telegram from Robert in New York. “Shall I come back.” Instantly she sent a one-word answer: “Yes.” She would be glad to see him, because she did not love him. Precisely that. (A pity I can’t put this in a telegram, she thought; it would explain so much.) Because she would have no more children, she no longer needed him as a stud. He was merely a business associate of her father’s, an old friend. He would come—in sexless friendship, no pulse stirred her body any more—and she would be very glad to have him back. Gently, quietly. Like two animals trotting wearily in the same direction, untouching.
Yes, she thought; yes, indeed. …
She had loved God and she had loved her son. And that was enough. Love was a burden she was glad to be rid of.
Robert, 1942–1955
ANNA DID NOT WRITE him of Anthony’s death. The letter came from the Old Man. Robert in his London office stared at the paper and thought: What? Over and over again: What? Even when he knew he should have gotten beyond that, even when he knew he should have understood, he found himself still saying and thinking: What?
The Old Man’s letter was perfectly clear, perfectly direct. Almost formal. Almost business-like. As if he had a routine for telling a man his son was dead.
But what? Robert found himself staring out the curtain-less window across the bombed-out rubble. His building, converted into American staff offices, showed hardly a dent. But across a small square (treeless now), block after block was totally destroyed—heaps of brick and blackened wood and isolated walls that crumbled with the freezes and thaws of winter. One of the men from the Provost Marshal’s office upstairs, a cocky little red-headed fellow, said: “You better hope we don’t get any hot weather. It’s a lousy cemetery over there.”
Like Germany. He’d spent almost six weeks in Germany, never knowing why he was there, a lieutenant commander from Navy Supply, in the middle of the army’s war. He lived through a series of unnamed towns and villages, all one-dimensional, standing single walls, not a four-walled building left, matchsticks sticking up into skies that stank with the dead. And through it all, twisting and turning, miles of white tape. The engineers used it to mark areas not yet cleared of mines. You followed the white tape, like a child’s party game. …
He watched civilians come out of those ruins, pushing the stones aside, Christs from the tomb. Funny round eyes. Cringing, obsequious. Hail to the new conqueror; have you something to eat? “Jesus Christ,” he heard a sergeant say, “even the women ain’t worth fucking.”
What did you expect of a corpse, he thought. They just rose up. It’s Resurrection Day without the glory. Just the stench, the pervasive constant stench.
HE SAT at his desk and read the Old Man’s letter over and over again. Anthony. The tall thin boy. His son.
Someone asked: “Is this ready to go, sir?”
“Yes,” he said.
How could the boy drown? That wasn’t possible. He’d seen him summer after summer, first hardly more than a baby, splashing in the warm shallow Gulf water. The baby changed into a lanky sinewy boy; the splash changed into a deliberate stroke, steady, relaxed. … Robert watched him by the hour, as if he’d never seen a child before. Watched him in the water, watched him at parties in the garden, following streamers round and round the flowers. Follow the tape and get the prize. … That same streamer ran through the ruins. Follow the tape, live until tomorrow. … Anthony playing. Anthony running on green grass in the rose garden, among the flaming-red roses. Anthony laughing as he ran along the length of white tape, reeling it in.
Robert’s helmet was on the side of the desk. He picked it up and swinging it like a hatchet he broke every glass in the window, and then methodically pulverized the wood frames. When he was done, all he had was a better view of the cemetery rubble below. He threw the helmet toward it.
THE GLASS cuts healed. The doctors provided him with Seconal and dexedrine. He found that if he took them both, followed by a stiff drink of whiskey, he could survive. He wrote one letter to Anna, then only to the Old Man.
Day after day he stared out at the ruins as they changed with the seasons, glistened under the rain, gleamed softly under the snow.
The war was so nearly over that the English began clearing the rubble. Sometimes Robert watched the crews at work, noticing without emotion that the bodies they found were always headless. He thought about that seriously, ponderously. The head was so delicately attached. He’d noticed in Germany that it blew off first in an explosion, leaving behind a jangle of arms and legs. Now, in these fallen buildings, they found flattened bodies, heads missing. They must have popped, he thought, like oranges, been squeezed dry and evaporated. That was very funny, he thought. Very funny.
The English carried the bodies away, to bury them decently. It bothered Robert that they should at last be taken from the rubble; they seemed to have snuggled there so comfortably—like the waves that rocked Anthony eternally. The living pulled the dead out like potatoes to replant them in a green stretch somewhere. Would they grow underground, like potatoes, multiplying out of sight? He could see a hazy green slope and under it lines and lines of skeletons standing at parade rest: little ones, and big ones, and some tiny ones that must have been infants, all in proper rows, all headless. …
Every night he could manage, Robert walked to his girl’s apartment, stumbling, dodging cars that raced out of the black. There always seemed to be an American voice shouting, “Taxi!” His girl said that you could hear them yelling even over the air-raid sirens, even during the lull between the bombs. …
Her name was Norah; she worked in the Transport Office next to his building and lived in a small apartment that belonged to her mother. (“The old lady took off at the first explosion.”) He’d met her not two weeks after he arrived, went to bed with her that same night. She was his regular girl, and he was even faithful to her.
Because she’d been born in India, she cooked him curries with her mother’s hoarded spices and the food he got from military supplies. After a while he began to think all England smelled of curry. The scent got in his uniforms and into his hair and nose. It walked around with him like an invisible shield. He was ve
ry happy with her. At times he knew he loved her, but he never mentioned Anthony’s death. Not a word, not a hint. Nothing, except on some nights he fled to the bathroom, retching until he bled.
“You’re sick,” she said.
“No.”
“It’s me?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“It’s me,” she said, “I know it’s me.”
He should have told her about Anthony. But he couldn’t. Any more than he could tell her about those party ribbons he saw twisting around bombed-out ruins every time he closed his eyes.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
He knew she did not believe him; there was a shadow across her broad face that hadn’t been there before.
In April she told him she was pregnant. “It will be November, I think.
He blew into his teacup, watching ripples form on the yellow surface. It was the pattern waves made as they crossed the Gulf sands. Sheltered shallow sands where Anthony had kicked and crawled.
“I’m glad,” she said. “I want a child.”
“I can’t marry you.”
She smiled her pale small-mouth smile. “I didn’t expect you to, Commander.”
“I don’t think it’s so god damn funny.”
“Anyway,” she said quietly, “all those years we lived in India, my parents would talk about home. Isn’t that queer? I got used to thinking of London as home too. And I still do. I’ll stay here.” She scratched at a nick on the rim of her glass. “I’ve wanted a child for years, Robert. During the worst of the war, I couldn’t. I was too afraid of getting killed.”
“You can get killed anywhere,” he said. “You remember when we went down in the country?”
THAT WAS a year ago, or even more, when he and Norah managed a few days’ leave together. Going to the country was Norah’s idea; the air is good for you, she insisted. It was late fall, gray sky, gray land. They slept in cold wet beds, with strange-smelling sheets. They pedaled bicycles for miles along empty gray lanes, through deep ruts filled with the opaque gray cloudiness of freezing water. Norah loved it. Robert, his hands and feet numb, his nose running, knew that he had never seen such animation in her face, such beauty. Her cheeks were flaming red and her eyes an extraordinary blue. All because of some frost-burned fields and dark dripping hedges. …
Nobody expected the raid; everybody said that German planes would never be in the skies again. “Oh, no,” Norah said when the siren went off. “Oh, no!” Robert rolled over: “Forget it, maybe it’s a false alarm.” They dozed until the all-clear; then Robert said, “I’m hungry. Let’s eat.” “There was one,” she said, “one explosion.” “Forget it, I’m hungry,” he said.
They bicycled later, both of them a little drunk from three beers at breakfast. “Look,” Norah said. It had been a big farmhouse, impressive, with a wide scattering of outbuildings. Robert whistled softly: “They took a direct hit.” “Robert,” Norah said, “why would they bomb that?” Robert took a flask from his pocket, passed it to her; in the cold it was difficult keeping an alcoholic glow. “I can guess,” Robert squinted into the gray sky. “They sure as hell didn’t start out to hit a farmhouse. They were turned back someplace else and had to get rid of their bombs before they went home. The book says you’ve got to find a secondary target, and when they saw a good big building, all by itself, they made a run. You know, I bet that was the only time they ever hit a target. …”
“THAT’S WHAT I mean,” Robert said, “the poor bastards in that house, thinking they were safe way out in the country. … It doesn’t matter where you are.”
I had a son once, killed in his own front yard, with his mother in the house. I’ve been shot at and I’m alive. He was safe, and he’s dead. …
But he said nothing of that to Norah, that April day in London.
“You’ll be going home in a few months,” Norah said, “and you weren’t going to ask me to come with you, now were you?”
“No,” he said.
“There, you see.”
He was getting a headache. He wondered if he had any aspirin in his coat pocket, maybe even some codeine. He got up to feel through his pockets. “Just one thing,” he said. “You’re so sure that I won’t care a damn about the baby.”
He found a small box of codeine and swallowed one of the tiny white pills with a beer. Realizing she hadn’t answered, he said again: “Norah, how do you think I’d feel leaving a child of mine?”
“It isn’t your child.”
For a moment he did not believe it; he did not think he had heard it. “Well,” he said. The single sound hung in the air, so nakedly that he did not say another word.
He stared at the wall, thinking that it needed paint. And there was a very small noise: the beer in his hand was rattling. He lifted it closer to his ear. Yes, that was it. Bubbles popping from the surface, disappearing into air. He drank from the glass, slowly, letting the foam accumulate on his upper lip. He stopped and listened again; he could hear the tiny pops of bubbles leaving the surface of his skin.
He finished the beer, wiped his mouth on his open palm. He put on his overcoat, buttoning it methodically. He left Norah without saying a single word.
He went to the Officers Club, and sat quietly at one end of the bar, looking up only when somebody slapped his shoulder. “Come on, Rob, old pal,” they said, “have a drink with us.” He shook his head. The stool was too comfortable, his legs wrapped exactly around it, his elbows fitted so nicely into the shelf of the bar.
They carried him to his quarters that night, his friends, though he remembered nothing of it. They woke him the next morning and got him to work on time. They gave him oxygen from the special tank they kept for problem hangovers; they fed him dexedrine and coffee until he was able to sit at his desk, with his head straight against the straight line of his shoulders. They even did his work for him. He seemed to drag a huge body around slowly, a hermit crab in an out-sized shell. Hour by hour the shell shrank until—at night—it turned into his own fitting skin. And, with his skin settled over his bones again, he began wondering: Was Norah telling the truth?
I’ve one son dead, he thought. Do I lose this other one too?
A month later Norah married a man named Edward Harris, and they lived in the same apartment, her mother’s apartment. Once or twice Robert walked by, half intending to knock on their door. With the child due in November, Norah would be visibly pregnant now. Would the lump of her body help him identify the child?
He wondered if she ever saw him passing, if she ever looked through the curtains. If she ever stood in the window, as the months rolled by toward November, with her belly swelling bigger and bigger, watching the street below.
He knew the child was his; he was certain.
In August he was ordered to New York. In October he was in New Orleans, a civilian again. I wish I could see the child, he thought. But he never went back to England, and he never heard from Norah again.
HE FLEW to Pensacola on a Navy plane, got a jeep from the transportation pool; he was going home to Port Bella. It was a long drive, he was tired, and in the dark he kept running off the road. He stopped and, rolling up his useless heavy overcoat for a pillow, stretched out on the grass. He woke in the hazy first light, a stray dog sniffing at his feet, his face and hair dripping with dew.
Great beginning, he thought: flat out in the dirt while some woolhat’s dog stares at me.
He got up, staggering with cramp, tossed the coat into the back seat, noticing with satisfaction the dust smears on its clean Navy surface.
The gates were closed and locked; he had no key. The phone to the caretaker’s house was at the side, but Robert didn’t bother. He simply drove the jeep straight into the gate, three, four times, until the wood splintered away from the hinges, and the jeep slipped through.
Underbrush crowded the winding sandy road, the drooping faces of palmetto brushed the car’s fenders, fallen pines littered the woods. In the open sunny spaces blackberry bushes ran unhin
dered into tangles of thorn. The buckwheat field was waist-high in Johnson grass, with a dozen scraggly ailanthus trees.
Even the lawns looked raggedy. The grass was mowed neatly enough, but not edged. Most of the flower beds were gone. Only the rose garden still blazed with color. Trust Anna, he thought; she would always have a rose garden.
He swung the jeep toward the beach. Beyond the narrow sand the empty Gulf was the same flat calm winter blue as the sky.
Anthony had come this way. He had walked slowly across this grass, across this yielding sand, out on the sun-bleached pier.
The boards shook with Robert’s weight; sea gulls fled from their perches.
Anthony had walked along these boards.
Robert stared into the shallow water. A big blue crab scuttled by, then a school of minnows nibbled the weeds on the pilings.
Anthony stood here once; and saw this. Anthony got into a boat here.
Robert sat on the end of the pier, legs dangling, shoes almost touching the water, and stared out toward the hazy bright horizon.
Anthony went that way. The last place he’d been was on the pier. Robert put out both hands and patted the rough boards. Here.
The sun was high now, and beginning to get hot. Robert could feel sweat running down the back of his neck, soaking into his wool coat. For a minute he saw himself as clearly as in a mirror: a gray-haired man, grown too heavy, cheeks smeared with beard, dark uniform striped with braid and spattered with ribbons. … He’d put on his dress blues. To come home.
He had a picture of Anthony in his wallet. He’d never showed it, never looked at it himself. He took it out now, studied it slowly and carefully; then, stretching out his arm, he dropped it into the water. It would float there until the tide carried it away, carried it along the twists and turns and curves like highways, all the invisible well-defined patterns of the water. As Anthony had been carried.
Robert got to his feet very slowly. “Anthony!” he called.
The Condor Passes Page 27