Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  He had not thought about the Josephina Eterna’s sister ship since he was a child and Wallace had shown him newspaper clippings about the disaster. In photos, he and Marian had been two bundled, faceless pupae being carried down the gangway of the SS Manaus by their father. There had been stray mentions of L&O’s other, newer liner, Maria Fortuna, which had only recently gone into service. He walked around the ship, trying to imagine its former splendor. Some merchant seamen had stayed on, and he waylaid an engineer in a corridor belowdecks.

  “She had a sister ship that sank, didn’t she?” Jamie asked. “The Josephina?”

  “That’s right. Bad thing. Before my time, of course.” Soldiers and sailors were squeezing past in both directions. “Better stop holding up traffic,” the engineer said and was gone, absorbed into the flow.

  * * *

  —

  Jamie had been given a few days’ leave between the Aleutians and his departure from San Francisco, and when the transport plane from Kodiak unexpectedly stopped in Seattle to refuel, he’d decided, on impulse, to disembark.

  When he identified himself on the telephone, Sarah Fahey—Sarah Scott—had made a small, indecipherable sound. “Did you get the watercolor I sent?” he asked.

  She cleared her throat. “I did.”

  He waited for her to say something else. When she didn’t, he said, “I didn’t mean to bother you. I thought of you because I’m in town, but I’ll let you go.”

  “Yes,” she said in a vague voice. “Yes, all right.”

  He’d gone out and had too many drinks in a bar rowdy with servicemen. The same old bewildered, clutching, yearning feeling rose up in him like something coming out of the deep, roiling the surface. Why had he called her? Why couldn’t he leave well enough alone? If there was one thing he should have learned from their last meeting, it was that she was an illusion, a fantasy, and anything between them was impossible, anyway. Seeking her out yet again was the height of foolishness.

  When he’d made the watercolor of Adak’s harbor, it had been one of those golden moments in between storms, the horizon deep indigo while lemony light skittered across the water. Even the ugliest heaps of military junk along the shoreline had been bathed in a heavenly glow, and he’d felt a pressure in his chest—the sublime. As the colors seeped from his brush, he’d been overwhelmed with gratitude to Sarah. She’d goaded him into enlarging his life.

  Attu hadn’t driven away his gratitude but had complicated it, shot it through with something dark and heavy as iron ore.

  In the morning, he found a message slipped under his hotel room door. Would he please meet Mrs. Scott for lunch? An hour was given, and an address, just down the street. He tried to remember if he’d told her where he was staying, was nearly positive he hadn’t.

  He’d thought, right up until the appointed time, that he wouldn’t go, but of course he did. She was waiting at a booth in the back of the dim, grubby diner she’d chosen, out of place in her neat blue suit and pumps, her face tense.

  “Nice to see you,” he said. He sat down and began studying the menu. “Do you already know what you want?”

  She reached across the table to touch the back of his hand. “Jamie, I’m sorry,” she said.

  He put down the menu. “For what?”

  “To start, for the way I was on the phone. I was shocked. And my sister was in the room. I couldn’t say anything I needed to say with her there.”

  A waiter appeared, an older man in a paper hat with a paunch hanging over his stained apron, pen poised above his notepad. “What’ll it be?”

  “We might need a minute,” Jamie said. The guy stuck the pen behind his ear and went away.

  “Are you actually hungry? We could go somewhere else to talk,” Sarah said. “To your hotel?” She blushed. “I chose this place only because it’s right nearby.” He slid out of the booth at once. She held out her hands. “I may need your help. My knees are shaking.”

  “How did you find me?” he asked as they walked out, her holding his arm.

  “I thought you might stay near the museum, so I worked out from there, calling hotels.”

  “How many did you call?”

  “Seventeen.”

  They did not talk much more until later, after he had taken off her blue suit and white silk blouse, after he had unclipped her stockings and rolled them down, divested her of her inner casing of girdle and bra and panties. He worked slowly and methodically, stopping her every time she tried to assist or hasten the process. When she was finally naked on the bed, her hair loose on her shoulders, he’d stepped back and looked at her. She’d stared back, and he’d closed his eyes, testing himself, summoning her image, willing himself to remember.

  “My brother died,” she said after, lying in the crook of his arm. “In the Pacific. I’d only just come out of the worst of it when I got your watercolor. I knew you’d gone, of course, but after Irving died I realized that if not for me, you might be tucked up safe somewhere. I’d actually tried to shame you. I suppose that’s part of what drives this whole thing, isn’t it? Everybody wants everybody else to suffer as they are. People wish things on others they never could have imagined. They do things they couldn’t have imagined. When your painting arrived, all I could think was—what have I done?” She lifted her head to look at him. “If not for me, would you have gone?”

  “I think so. You have power over me, but not that much. Don’t feel responsible.”

  She dropped her forehead onto his chest. “I wish it were that simple.”

  “Me too.”

  “My husband’s in the Mediterranean.” She looked up again fiercely. “I do love him.”

  “I didn’t think this meant you didn’t.”

  She settled back down, tugged gently at his chest hair. “So blond,” she said. “You turned out wooly. I wouldn’t have expected.”

  “I’m as surprised as you.”

  “Did you know one of your Alaska paintings was in Life magazine?”

  “Yes, they told me.”

  “Have you seen it?” Naked, unembarrassed, she got out of bed and extracted the magazine from her handbag. They leaned against the headboard together, and she flipped to an article about the Aleutians. His painting was of the airfield on Adak: a plane kicking up spray as it landed under an approaching storm.

  He studied the reproduction. “I never thought I’d be a propagandist.”

  “Is that what they want from you?”

  “No. Surprisingly, no. They’ve given me almost total freedom. Well, as much freedom as anyone has in the navy.” He drew her close, rested his chin on top of her head. “This reminds me of when you’d come up to the attic to help me look through the art. It was the most alone I ever felt with you.”

  “We had clothes on then.”

  “I desperately wished we didn’t.”

  “Me too.”

  “Really?”

  “Sometimes. I didn’t quite know what I wanted.” She was still looking at the magazine. “You get used to thinking of the war happening in black and white because of the photos.”

  “Mmm.” He thought of the Japanese soldiers blowing themselves apart. “There are colors.”

  “This painting does something different than a photograph because you’ve bent the perspective ever so slightly. It has a feeling that’s informative in a different way than strict reality.” Her foot moved against his calf. “It’s still your work. It’s still you.”

  He got out of bed, went to his satchel, came back with the sketchbook he’d had on Attu. He opened it to a page he’d filled with blotches and scribbles and handed it to her. “I made these during the banzai charge. I thought I was drawing what I was seeing.”

  She turned the pages. “Weren’t you?”

  “I mean, when I looked at the paper, I actually saw realistic images. Figures, you know.
Scenes.” She was quiet. “I killed three men,” he said. He hadn’t told anyone before. It would have been strange to tell anyone in the Aleutians. Superfluous. He churned with nerves, though he was not haunted by the memory of the three dead men; he was haunted by the medical tent, the shapes moving under the canvas.

  “It’s a war,” Sarah said.

  “Would you mail this to my sister for me?” he asked about the copy of Life. “I’d like her to see it. I don’t know if I’ll have a chance before I’m sent off again. I’ll give you her address in England.”

  “She’s in England?”

  He told her, as best he knew, about the ATA and about Marian’s years in Alaska and also, eventually, about Barclay.

  After a hesitation, Sarah said, “I should say that my mother told me about when Marian came here. Not at the time but recently. After I last saw you. Don’t worry, she would never tell my father. He has no idea about most of what she does.”

  “It was a kindness. More than that. She gave Marian a new life.”

  “Yes, I think so, too, now that I understand. I’m embarrassed about how I reacted before, last time, when you said Marian didn’t want to have children.”

  “It’s all right. I’m embarrassed about some things I said, and also because I didn’t find out anything really about your life. Will you tell me now?”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start anywhere.”

  She told him about her sons, her love for them but also her sense of being confined by motherhood. She told him she loved her husband but resented his assumption of her fealty. She told him about her sisters and their families, about Irving’s death on Bataan. He told her about how he’d veered toward becoming a drunk, how Marian had taken him to Vancouver, about Judith Wexler and Sally Ayukawa, about going to the mountains and leaving again, about Wallace dying. The afternoon waned. The room grew dim, but they didn’t turn on any lights. After they’d dressed, they held each other for a long time by the door, knowing that once they stepped outside, something would be over. He walked with her to the lobby, watched her go out into the evening, her hair still loose.

  When he checked out of the hotel, before he boarded his train for San Francisco, he gave the clerk a paper-wrapped parcel and paid for it to be delivered by courier to Sarah’s house. The note, which he’d written on hotel stationery and tucked inside the sketchbook, read:

  Technically this belongs to the United States Navy, and it’s not mine to give. But I don’t want to send it to Washington, and I don’t want to carry it around anymore. Would you keep it for me? Maybe I want to leave something with you so I have an excuse to see you again—yes, I do—but really the reason I’ll come back is because I love you, and what I’ve left of myself can never be reclaimed.

  Stalag Luft I, near Barth, Germany

  June 1943

  Around the same time Jamie sailed from San Francisco

  Leo, when Eddie first saw him, a week after he arrived in camp, was onstage in a gauzy blue dress of dyed, stitched-together handkerchiefs and a brittle wig made from Red Cross packing material, two straw braids tied with twine. He was Gabby in The Petrified Forest, playing against a set made from Red Cross crates, with props bartered from the German guards, who had borrowed them from a theater company in town. Thousands of men desperate for distraction made good audiences. The guards came, too, sat in the front row.

  “A lot of girls I know could learn a thing or two from that,” the guy next to Eddie whispered, gazing appreciatively at Leo.

  That. Because what was he? He was obviously not a woman, but also, somehow, he could make himself indistinguishable from one. Some of the guys who played girls (not just in the plays, Eddie learned, but at the camp’s oddly earnest dances and teas, too) fully embraced the rituals of womanhood and shaved their arms and legs and concocted homemade lipstick and blush, but Leo with his big beaky nose and hairy arms only had to put a bit of softness into his joints, a bit of sway into his spine and a careful flourish into his fingers, and he was a lonely, pretentious, impetuous girl tending a gas-station lunchroom in Arizona. Watching, Eddie could almost feel the desert heat, smell the grease of the deep fryer.

  Eddie started looking for Leo after that, almost didn’t recognize him when they wound up next to each other in the wash shed, despite the nose. “You were great in the play,” he ventured. “Were you an actor before?”

  “No, I was a bombardier.”

  “I mean before before.”

  “I knew what you meant. Only in my dreams. I never had the nerve even to audition in high school. But here—why not? What do I have to lose?”

  “You were terrific. The guy next to me said real girls could learn something from you.”

  Leo pressed his lips together. “They like to say that.”

  “I suppose it’s all in good fun,” Eddie said, cautious.

  Leo gave the same brief, polite smile. “Can be.”

  “Desperate times, desperate measures?”

  “For some.”

  Eddie dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “Poor bastards,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  The plane had been shot up by a Messerschmitt; the engine caught fire. The copilot and the tail gunner were dead already, shot, when the pilot told the rest to hit the silk. The bombardier went out first, through the same bay from which he’d dropped so many bombs, then the radioman, then Eddie. Strange to plunge through the sky only in his body, without the encapsulation of the plane, falling among the flak and the bullets and the droning engines, the fire. He’d pulled the rip cord.

  The radioman was shot dead while hanging from his parachute, and Eddie didn’t know what happened to the pilot and the other guys. Eddie and the bombardier were taken to Frankfurt to be interrogated, and from there he was sent to the camp, on the Baltic. As the prisoners walked from the train to the gates, people gathered on the side of the road to jeer at them and mime nooses and firing squads.

  * * *

  —

  “I don’t understand why it has to be that I’m more a woman than a woman,” Leo said to Eddie a month after they met. They were in Leo’s barracks, Leo standing near the stove and Eddie wedged into a corner among the bunks, as there was nowhere else he could fit himself. The rooms were sixteen by twenty-four and housed fifteen men. Leo had a tin cup full of hot water from the laundry, a special favor from one of the guys there, and a sliver of Red Cross soap and was scrubbing at his makeup. “After the match, Lieutenant Bork or Brox or whatever it is, the religious one who won’t shut up about being from Pittsburgh, told me there wouldn’t have been any call for Eve—like Eve-in-the-garden Eve—if I’d been there! It would have been a different kind of original sin, no doubt, but I think he’s confused. About a few things.”

  Leo had spent the afternoon sauntering around in a skirt and wig and shirt tied around his ribs, holding up scorecards for a boxing match while hundreds of kriegies hooted and hollered and shouted lewd suggestions.

  Eddie said, “I hope someday someone tells Lieutenant Brock how babies are made.”

  “Guys just want to reassure themselves it doesn’t mean anything if they think about me while they’re spanking it. I’m more woman than a woman, after all! I’m femininity distilled down to its purest, tittiest essence.”

  “I think most of them just miss girls more than they know what to do with.”

  “Fine, but that’s not my problem. Do I think they all want to suck my dick? No. Do I think most of them wouldn’t turn down getting their dick sucked by me at this point? Well.” He craned his face toward Eddie. “Did I get it all?”

  Eddie dipped his thumb in the water and wiped at the corner of Leo’s eye. “Just something here.” He put his big hand around the back of Leo’s head and kissed him.

  Leo pulled away. “Someone will come in.”

&n
bsp; “Someone always comes in.”

  Leo was, to Eddie’s mind, surprisingly shy about their relationship. There were one or two other couples in the camp—real couples—and they were generally tolerated as long as they maintained some semblance of discretion, which was a low bar in a place so crowded. There were other kinds of relationships, too: paired-off straight men as devoted and sexless as old spinsters, for example, or serious partnerships based entirely around food sharing. There were strictly sexual liaisons between camp queers, between queers and squares, between obliging squares. There were swapped favors of all kinds, all varieties of love. There were murky, confusing friendships that ended in bewilderment or hurt feelings or fistfights.

  “After the war,” Eddie said, “the first thing I want to do is find a room, a clean room that doesn’t smell like a latrine—”

  “It’s worse than ever right now, isn’t it?” said Leo.

  “—a clean room with a bed with clean sheets and a door that both locks and unlocks, and I want to spend a whole night with you. I want to be completely naked, and I want to take my time.”

  Leo patted his cheek. “Sounds great.”

  “And the next night, and the night after that.”

  Hamble, England

  November 1943

  Five months after Jamie sailed from San Francisco

  “A man came looking for you,” one of the other pilots said as Marian sat down in the Hamble mess for lunch.

  Marian took a bite of bubble and squeak. “What man?” She had gone to White Waltham for a few weeks in September to upgrade to heavy twin-engines, Class IV, and instead of being sent back to Ratcliffe, she’d been reassigned to Hamble, the all-female No. 15 ferry pool, not far from Southampton, near the Vickers Supermarine factories from which Spitfires and twin-engine bombers emerged as steadily as eggs from a henhouse. The town was pleasantly quaint. The airfield lay between the River Hamble and Southampton Water, blanketed by industrial smog and surrounded by balloon barrages.