by Belva Plain
“You didn’t hear the telephone,” she said.
“No. What is it?”
“They called from home. My friend Nora did. She didn’t want me to walk in alone and find the telegram.”
Ned, he thought, the boy. Oh God, no, not her boy.
“It’s Alex. He’s dead. Oh Martin, Alex is dead!”
Kneeling on the floor, he put his arms about her waist “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He was gentle, he was kind.”
“It’s so rotten cruel! Hard! Cruel!”
“I know. I know it is, my darling.”
“You see death every day. But I—”
For a long time he held her with her head resting on his. At last she spoke.
“How am I going to tell Ned and the girls? I won’t be able to think of any words.”
“You’ll think of them.”
“Emmy’s been homesick. I’ve spent hours on the telephone with her. They’ve been so afraid for their father.”
“You’ll know what to say. Tell me, isn’t Ned stationed near me?”
“About an hour’s drive, I should think. Oh, do you think—could you?”
“I’ll switch hours with someone. And there’s a fellow in transport who’ll get me a car. You remember, he’s dropped me off a few times at Lamb House?”
“I remember.” She began to cry again. “Martin, I’ve just thought, what if it were you? How could I bear it?”
“People do. And you would. But it isn’t likely to be me.”
“I know you feel guilty about not being overseas.”
“I do …”
Yet—if he had to go now and leave her, how hard it would be. All, all a welter of conflict, the whole damn business of living! A man’s guilts and his desires, pressing and pulling at him.
He caught her to him. In the midst of death, life clamors. Something like that went through his head.
“Unhook the collar of your dress,” he said. “The lace. I don’t want to tear it.”
He picked her up. Almost as tall as he she was, but so light, so firm and light, so supple and fine. My lovely. Never, never anything in all the world like this! Never. Oh Mary, life clamors.
Winter fog hung in the trees. The car was an open one, and the cold beat about their heads as Martin drove. The boy sat staring straight forward. His first tears had been shed and swallowed. Only a prominent Adam’s apple bobbed now and then in his thin neck. They sped through villages, down High Streets deserted, as afternoon neared evening and people went indoors to shelter. And Martin recalled the day they had buried his own father, on just such a still day between Christmas and New Year’s, with the dry ground frozen and no wind.
This boy’s father, though, would lie in no coffin among flowers, with hands that the undertaker had neatly clasped. This boy’s father—was pieces blown somewhere in the desert air, fragments in the desert sand.
“You know he’s to get a medal for heroism?” Ned spoke unexpectedly.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Mother’s friend has a relative in the War Office and he found out. My father saved four lives. Crazy, isn’t it?”
“Crazy? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“He didn’t have to go to fight, that’s what I mean. They wouldn’t even have taken him if they’d known.”
“Known what?”
The boy turned a clear and earnest face to Martin. “Why—what you know. He wasn’t—he wasn’t—” The Adam’s apple bobbed. “Don’t make me say it when you already know about him, please.”
“I see.” Martin was appalled. Was there no innocence left in the world at all? And he asked, “Who told you?”
“I heard it around the village when I was still in school. I’ve known for years.”
“I see,” Martin said again.
“People are rotten about it.”
“I know.”
“Some boy said he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. They won’t be able to say that now, will they?”
“It would be a rotten thing to say even if it were true.”
They rode on silently until Martin said, “We’re almost there. We’ll make it by six, I should think.”
More silence. Then Ned spoke again. “Isn’t there anything you want to ask me?”
“What should I ask you?”
“I thought you might want to know whether—whether I’m like my father. I’m not. I’ve had plenty of girls already, and they’re what I want.”
“What you want isn’t any of my business, is it?” Martin responded quietly.
“You’re very decent. My father said you were. He said you were the only person who’d really understood.”
“You spoke of this with him?”
“Yes. After I’d first heard talk, I went and asked him. And he told me. I guess it was one of the hardest things a man might ever have to tell his son. But he did it.”
“And, may I ask, how did you feel?”
“Sick about it. I ran out of the room and cried. I couldn’t talk to him or even look at him for days. But then after a while, after I had thought about it, I went back. He was my father, and a better father to me than most of my friends had.”
A boy like this one could make a lot of people ashamed of themselves, Martin thought.
“I felt sorry for Mother, though,” Ned went on. “She stayed because of us, the girls and me. I knew that. The girls didn’t and don’t. There couldn’t have been much in it for her, could there?”
I love your mother, Martin wanted to say, and imagined the boy replying, I know, my father told me that, too.
But he said only, “She loved her children. You were worth it to her.”
At Lamb House lights were on, the driveway was full of cars. With his arm around Ned’s shoulders, they walked together, Martin with Mary’s boy, into the house.
A week or more before the sixth of June in 1944, Martin had gone south on medical affairs and stood where one could look across Southampton water to the Isle of Wight. From Weymouth Bay across to Portland Bill lay a thousand ships or more, destroyers, landing craft and minesweepers. So in his bones he had known, and was therefore not surprised to be awakened toward morning on the sixth of June by the sweep and drone of hundreds of airplanes flying overhead. It had begun.
In the wards expectant faces look up from the beds. “It’s here,” they say, and then, in some primitive ritual of denial, are silent. For if it failed—one dared not think of that.
First announcements, oddly enough, come over the German radio, sounding as if nothing much has happened. “The Allies have attempted a small landing on the coast of France.”
Later in the morning comes a short statement from the BBC: “Allied naval forces under the command of General Eisenhower, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies on the coast of France.”
By noon the churches are filled, from Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s in London to the smallest village chapel. Under Gothic stone lace, facing the pale tips of lighted candles, old men and women with sons, and young women with husbands, bow their heads to pray.
Martin would give much to be part of that day in France, even as he knows that its first casualties will soon be rolling down the road to his door.
Through summer and autumn, the momentum quickens. The train gathers speed, it tops the hill and goes roaring down the long straight track. Paris is liberated; De Gaulle strides down the Champs Elysées. The Germans withdraw. The Allies pursue and cross the Moselle River.
In dark December the Germans gather strength for their last stupendous effort in the Ardennes. At first the radio brings bleak reports for the Allies from Bastogne, from Namur and Liège. But in the end, the stupendous effort fails and, late in the winter, the Germans are driven back. The Allies cross the Rhine at Remagen Bridge. The war in Europe is as good as over.
Now orders begin to arrive. Major So-and-so is to proceed to Michigan or New York to receive the wounded from the Pacific theater. Captain So-and-so is to
proceed to California to embark for the Pacific theater.
One day, Mary speaks what for many weeks has been unspoken between them.
“They’ll be sending you home soon,” she says.
It is both a statement and a question. Martin doesn’t answer.
He went outside and lay down in the grass. At the top of the rise, he could see the wheelchairs on the terrace where convalescents had been let out to gaze at a spring that some of them had thought never to see again.
At the foot of the modest hill, a stream curved under an arched stone bridge. Gilded catkins hung from the willows, which in summer stood like young girls with streaming, long pale hair. A hawk sailed over Martin’s head, paused in the sky and plunged behind the rim of the trees.
He closed his eyes. The air was full of sounds, blending into one long hum of afternoon, of bees, wind and larks. There was a rhythm to lark-song: five beats long, two short. There was rhythm and music in all things. Passionately, he wished he could know more about music.
Someone was playing ragtime on the battered piano in the hall. It was the boy from Chicago, no doubt, the one whose arm he had repaired so well, except for one lost finger. The boy had been worried about the piano; it meant a lot to him, he said, although he was no musician. He was playing pretty nicely in spite of the lost finger! Boom da da-da, boom da da-da.
From the porch came the click and tick of Ping-Pong balls; there was a cadence in the volleys. All his senses were so sharp today! Most of the time, he thought, we are only half alive, missing things. But perhaps it was better so, better not to feel so sharply.
The dog beside him licked his hand. He had forgotten that the dog was there, he’d grown so used to it. One cold night in the previous winter, he had found it sitting outside the local pub where he had gone for a beer. It was only a shabby mongrel of a type so common as to have become almost a breed in itself, with pointed ears and a setter’s tail meant to be carried in pride and gaiety. But some pleading in its face had caught at him, and he had stopped to talk to it Two villagers had come out and warned him away.
“It’ll bite you,” they said. One had picked up a stone. “Get out of here! Get the hell out of here!”
The dog moved a few steps and sat down. It had been desperate enough for food to risk the stone.
“People abandon them,” Major Pitman remarked. “It’s a disgrace.”
The man who had picked up the stone rebuked him. “They don’t have rations enough for themselves. What do you want?”
They had started to walk back to the hospital. At the end of the street, Martin had realized that the dog was padding behind them.
“I’ll have to get him something to eat,” he’d said.
“You’ll never lose him if you do,” Major Pitman had warned.
“I know.”
At Martin’s door, the dog had stood on the step waiting to be asked in.
“Oh, no,” he’d told him, “I’ve nothing for you.”
And the wretched creature had licked his hand.
“What am I to do with you?” he asked now. “It’s soon going to be over between you and me.”
The dog raised sorrowful brown eyes. I understand, they said, and he crept closer. A grasshopper, with green transparent wings like finest paper, lit a few inches from his paw, but the dog took no notice of it.
You will not abandon me, he told Martin; I believe in you.
Martin laid his hand on the warm flanks where you could no longer feel the ribs. “Yes, you know, don’t you? You know I can’t turn you out.”
The dog’s tail thumped the ground.
“Mary will have to take you. I’ll leave you behind with Mary.”
And Martin sat up. Leave you behind? Was he, then, really to go away? Twice in a lifetime? Haunted, haunted! A fairly intelligent man, supposedly in charge of his own life, he had been obsessed since the very first day.
What was it all about? Why were we here? What was history but a history of turbulent past griefs? Crackle of fires as Troy burned, he thought; splitting timbers as Jerusalem fell and Rome was sacked, weeping of parents when the Black Death emptied Europe, agony and shame of the concentration camps, thundering of bombs on burning London. So little time to flower in the sun and live and take one’s love!
Mary, Mary, I can’t leave you again. I can’t.
The dog crept closer still and licked his hand.
Hazel wrote, “Lorraine Mays tells me your unit is to be brought home by summer. She was surprised you hadn’t let me know, but I understand, darling, that prudent as you are, you didn’t want to raise my hopes until you could be absolutely sure.”
There were only three weeks left before departure. In the morning, every morning, while a crowded day still lay ahead, he assured himself that at some point in that day, everything would suddenly be resolved. And always the night came without solution. Well, tomorrow then?
There were two weeks left.
One day in London he passed a toy shop and saw in the window a wooden horse like one that Enoch had played with. Later he had an errand that took him past the Brompton Oratory, where he had pushed the newborn Claire in her perambulator. Here in these old, old places, past baroque stone, through mews and Georgian squares, she had first learned to walk. Always he saw her in that yellow coat and bonnet.
He felt weak, aware of his heartbeat. Turning into a cardiac neurotic, he thought, scornful of himself. But he was trembling when he arrived back at the hospital.
“Don’t you feel well, Colonel?” his new lieutenant asked.
“No, I’ve been fighting a blooming cold all week.”
He sat down at his desk before a sheaf of records which had been left for his signature. The words made no sense.
Was there any possible way he could request postponement? Any way orders could be rearranged, so that perhaps some other man who was in a hurry to go home—as who was not?—could go in his place? He needed time! Time to think! But of course, that was nonsense. This was the army. And shutting the door, he put his head down on the desk.
Write to Hazel? Take courage and put it all on paper? A lot of men in this war were doing and had done just that. For one sharp moment, he saw her sitting in the chair at the kidney-shaped desk where she used to read the mail; he saw her eyes crinkling in a smile, her face softening, as she opened the letter. He shivered.
Go home and tell her then. Give her as gently, as kindly, as reasonably as you can, the truth. But what of Enoch? What of Claire? Carpe diem, it is said; seize the day, seize life. It speeds away while you watch. And I’m forty-four years old.
He knelt on the floor beside their chair where Mary sat knitting. Narrow blue veins crossed and merged in delicate webbing on her wrists. He took the wool away and kissed her wrists. Had he been asked what he was feeling, he could have said it was not worship, it was not comfort, it was not joy, it was not desire. It was all of these and it was beyond them. It was beyond the farthest reach of longing.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Can’t go away?”
“No. Can’t go away.”
After a few days another letter came. “Enoch will be in the second grade next fall, imagine! He’s so like you, Martin, always reading. People say he looks like you, too. He wanted to have a picture of you in his room, so I had a duplicate made of the one on my night table. It’s the last thing I see before turning out the light and the first thing I see in the morning when I open my eyes.
“I think sometimes that if you were to stop loving me, I couldn’t bear it But then I know that couldn’t happen any more than I could stop loving you. I don’t think there can ever have been two people who understand each other better. I feel that even though you’re three thousand miles away, we’re still together. And soon, please God, we really shall be. I’ll turn in bed at night and you’ll be there, and it will no longer be a dream.”
Martin put the letter down. A dull sadness seeped into the room, like fog. He read on.
“I’
ve saved so much of your allotment, you’ll be surprised. Living alone like this, a woman doesn’t need to spend much. I hardly ever go to the stores except for Enoch’s clothes. And yesterday I bought a necklace for Claire’s birthday, seed pearls on a gold chain. She’s such an amazing girl. It’s hard to believe she’s only fifteen … Now that you’re coming home, though, I shall treat myself to some new clothes. Would you like to see me in a black lace nightgown?”
She had used to sit up in bed and wait for him when he was called out. She always said she couldn’t fall asleep until he was home. If only there were some meanness in her, some sly and reprehensible selfish streak which could assure her survival while it gave him an excuse! But no, she had wanted only and always to please everyone, even her exasperating relatives. God knew what fears, what chained resentments even, underlay that anxious love of pleasing!
And suddenly Martin heard his father’s voice. So often in the crises of his life, he had recalled that voice, not necessarily its words, rather its tone of earnest conviction. He remembered, too, the expressive movements of the hands, so uncharacteristically Mediterranean for a man from Ulster. And he thought of his own little son. What would that boy remember of his father?
He went down to the street He needed to move. Mary was to come in later from the country, but she had her key. The night was gray and the scudding clouds threatened rain. His footsteps pounded so that he startled himself and made himself walk more softly. He walked across the city and came to the river.
In the middle of the bridge, facing the Victoria Embankment, he lit a cigarette, then threw it down into the iridescent, oily water and watched it blink out. The sky behind the Houses of Parliament blackened as the storm approached. A flash of lightning brightened the long, even facade, the fretwork pinnacles, oriels and turrets of this place where men sat and made rules to keep themselves from consuming each other. He lit another cigarette, threw that one, too, into the water and began to walk home.
Some soldiers passed, their laughter stilling to a startled salute when they saw the American officer. Hearing their muttered “Had too many, that one!” as they passed him, he realized that they had heard him groan. Did he look as wretched as he felt? As woebegone? Yes, his head was bent, his hands were knotted behind his back as though he were pacing the floor of his own house. He straightened up.