Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  Humphrey didn’t even pause at the wire. He stepped over it, his hand out, “Merry Christmas, old chap,” he said.

  “Frohliche Weihnachten, mein freund,” the German said back, and they shook hands.

  I stood behind them, arms wrapped around me against the cold. The moon, bright as any flare. All the way up and down the lines, as far as I could see, men were tentatively climbing out of trenches, walking toward the enemy, embracing, pulling out pictures to show each other.

  Humphrey handed me a flask, his eyes shiny, his face alive with merriment. “It’s Schnapps,” he said. “It’s Christmas Schnapps.”

  I fell asleep that night in the trenches, and I woke up the next day, a year later on Christmas in a hospital in London. Called Gina on the telephone. Told her I was a friend of Humphrey’s. Found out he had died in January, but she was so glad to hear from me. Asked me if I was the “Yank” Humphrey had written to her about.

  We talked a long time. It was another good day. In the hospital they brought in big baked hams. Cut them up in the wards. Even the sickest of the sick. Even the amputees and fellows who’d been gassed in the battle who couldn’t hardly breathe, were happy. I made sure they sang “O Christmas Tree,” because I knew I’d made a friend. For the first time in my life I could talk to one person from day to day. Gina told me to keep in touch. With the telephone, I could. No matter where I was on Christmas Day, I could call her.

  So when I woke this morning, the man in the cot next to me offered me a smoke. A fellow from the kitchen told me that they’d be serving turkey and all the fixings in a couple of hours. Some kids from the high school were coming over later to carol with us. I asked him where the phone was. Yesterday—last year—Gina wasn’t doing so good. Her heart, she said, was weak. “But you’re sounding good,” she had said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The years have treated me well.”

  I made the call. She’s in a nursing home in San Francisco. Moved to America in ’57. I was afraid. The phone rang for a long time. Not many nurses on Christmas morning, and then someone answered.

  I asked for Gina. Gina who, she said, and I told her. “I’m new here,” she said. “I don’t know that patient.” Papers shuffled around on her end. She put the phone down, and someone mumbled to her in the background.

  You’ve got to understand. I’ve never known anyone for more than a day. A day is all I get. I don’t understand why. When the morning comes, I wake up, and it’s Christmas. Sometimes I won’t sleep for a couple of days, but everyone sleeps. It can’t be avoided. Maybe I vanish in the night. Maybe a year later I appear when no one is looking. Who can tell? I always wake up in a place where a stranger could go unremarked, an army, a hospital, a festival, a flop house and soup kitchen like this one. I don’t know if it’s a curse—there’s lots I don’t know—but all I get is a day a year, and I’m a stranger that no one knows.

  Then Gina came on the line. It was her voice. I’ve heard her grow old. “Hello, old friend,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  Each year she’s been there. Each year. She’s ninety-six now. I’m twenty-one today. It’s my birthday. In three-hundred and sixty-five years for you, I’ll be twenty-two, but I want to tell you something. It’s important I think.

  I hear rumors of bad things in the world. I hear about wars; I’ve even seen some, but in my experience, human beings are good. They’re generous. They share with strangers, and they reach out to someone they’ve only talked to on the phone once a year for eighty years. If you could just see things from my perspective, you’d understand, even without friends, people are good. There are reasons to hope.

  You shouldn’t give up. People will help.

  And you know what else? I wonder if you could do me a favor. You could? Great. I wonder—would you mind if I phoned you next year, here? Do you think you could find your way back here on Christmas to take my phone call? It would mean a lot to me.

  NIGHT SWEATS

  J uly 31, Friday Afternoon: Moving In

  In space’s far reaches, red-shifted radiation marks the universe’s beginning, a microwave ghost forever lingering after the Big Bang. When amateur astronomer Meadoe Omura puts her eye to the telescope to see her favorite nebulas, she travels backward in time, and light travels both ways. On August 6, 1945, a great flash illuminated Hiroshima. Photons, radiation, a radio pulse blasted into space. Years and years later, an attentive observer on one of Earth’s nearer star systems might catch the twinkle. The past made present, living in the eye.

  What has passed does not disappear; it recedes, ever fainter, but never gone, remaining, a ghost. Like what lived in the old house in Harriston that Meadoe bought, like what lived in Meadoe.

  In 1945 her grandfather worked a job on Hiroshima’s outskirts, excavating defense bunkers, when the sky turned bright, so terribly bright, and seconds later the dirt buried him and the others. The story stuck with Meadoe and when she was a little girl she had nuclear nightmares: a bomber’s high altitude roar, the peace of an early morning city, a mushroom cloud rising and rising. She thought about Hiroshima a lot, as she studied the stars, when she read quantum physics.

  But today Meadoe wondered, should I have bought the house? She stood on the porch, the new key unfamiliar to her touch. It cost so much. The apartment was fine. I could have taken another path than this one, like an electron. She thought about uncertainty. In quantum physics it meant that one could never tell both where an electron was and how fast it was going. It seemed an electron was in all the possible places at the same time. She’d tried to explain that to Joan, her therapist, once, but by the time she got to tachyons, a particle that appeared to travel backwards in time, Joan’s eyes glazed over.

  Of course, in my case, she thought, the uncertainty principle just means should I have signed a thirty-year mortgage?

  What had looked like pleasant landscaping swallowed the house, and the house itself leaned over her, large and quiet.

  Her radio was already unpacked—the movers must have set it up—so she turned it on and an oldies station playing a big band number crackled into life. She opened boxes until late.

  After eating part of a casserole, after screwing in the new deadbolts, after finding a nightshirt and blankets and a bedroom lamp, Meadoe went to bed.

  She fell asleep before she had a chance to hear any sounds her new house made.

  At 4:30 a.m. Meadoe woke. For a while she lay still, trying to figure out where she was and why she was so warm. Her blanket felt pounds too heavy, and her arm under the pillow buzzed with the numbness of sleeping on it wrong. A streetlight cast a pale white shaft alive with dust motes through her window. She decided she was awake for good and might as well unpack some more.

  Meadoe sat. “What the heck?” she said into the strange room. Her nightshirt clung to her, and when she pushed the blanket aside, it was soaked. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. When she stood by the bed and looked down, there, in sweat, was her outline.

  August 1, Saturday Morning: Therapy

  Joan said, “The key to your present is in your past.” She consulted her notes, her briefcase open on the couch. Curtains still weren’t hung, but the house had begun to look like home. Books were dusted and in the bookcase; her antique hook rug covered most of the living room floor.

  Joan flipped to a new page and clicked her pen. “You’re still virgin.”

  “Thirty-two years and not a tumble.” Meadoe kept her hands still in her lap. Old ground it might be, but she didn’t feel comfortable discussing it.

  “You told me something happened in high school.” Joan flicked back a few pages. “Christopher Towne. Basketball player. You knew him from church. He liked the same books you did. On the third date at the Deer Trail Park picnic area he tried…”

  “Yes, but he stopped.”

  “Before he started, did you want him to?”

  “What?”

  “Start.”

  Jo
an hadn’t asked that question before. Deer Trail Park sat at the end of a long dirt road south of town. When they’d pulled into the parking lot, Christopher dimmed his lights to keep them from shining into other cars. She picked out Ursa Major and Minor through the front windshield. Beyond the city, the stars glittered so clearly. Meadoe shut her eyes.

  “I knew kids made out there. I suppose I wanted to.”

  “You suppose?”

  “I wasn’t really sure what making out involved. I was fifteen. Nobody had talked to me about it. I thought it would be like Wuthering Heights. I never thought about sex. I still don’t.”

  Joan coughed. Meadoe knew she did that to cover a snicker. “So, you thought one of you would die and the other would pine forever? That’s ambitious for a third date.”

  It had been in early November, a few days before her birthday, which is why she remembered—the first cold night of the fall. Windows were fogged in the other cars. Chris had taken her to a movie, then headed to the park without asking.

  “No, what I like about Wuthering Heights is the second part anyway, after Catherine dies and Heathcliff keeps searching for her. Wuthering Heights is a bad example. Maybe I thought we’d hold hands. You know, and then kiss on the porch when he dropped me off.”

  Joan wrote in the notebook. “Sheesh, were we ever that young? Hadn’t you ever had a sexual fantasy with Christopher in it before? You knew you were going on the date; you’d been out with him twice already; didn’t you think about anything more extensive than holding hands?”

  They had held hands. He turned the engine off and moved next to her. Her hands clasped in her lap, like they were now, and he gently pried one free. She remembered she’d almost giggled at that, partly from nervousness, and partly because it all seemed so awkward. His fingers slid between hers; she couldn’t tell if it was her sweat or his.

  “I played with dolls still when I was fifteen. I read The Girl Scout’s Guide to the Stars,” said Meadoe. “I know it sounds silly, but I thought of myself as a little girl. Holding hands was the extent of it. Maybe carving our names in a tree.”

  She’d thought she should sigh when he squeezed her hand, but she didn’t. Her neck muscles bunched; blood pounded behind her eyes. Now that they were there, she longed to leave. Her lips snapped as they parted. “I want to go now,” she tried to say. Nothing came out. Chris slid closer. Her left hand was trapped in his; her shoulder pressed against the door, and he leaned to kiss her. There was no place to go, so she let his cheek push her head back to kiss her. It seemed bizarre. No passion within her. If he’d stop, she could ask him if it felt weird to him too. Kissing her hand would be as romantic as this. Rubbing a washcloth over her lips would feel no different. His breath heated her neck, and her shoulder ached where the door pushed into it.

  Chris leaned against her harder, turned toward her and wrapped his left leg over hers, forcing her knees apart, pinning her to the seat. He kept kissing her mouth, then the side of her face, breathing hard. “Meadoe,” he gasped. His hand worked its way into her blouse. Meadoe tried to twist away from the door, but she had no strength; it was as if her spinal cord had been cut—total paralysis. In her head she chanted “I want to go home now,” in a Dorthyesque way, as if tapping her ruby slippers together would take her from the car.

  Joan said, “So when do you think your emotional self caught up with your physical self?”

  Meadoe shook her head, her eyes still closed. Chris pulled his hand from her blouse, popping a button. He tugged her belt with one hand and pushed her hand against him. “Meadoe,” he said again, his breath full of after-dinner mint. Finally, she found her voice. “I want to go home now,” she said. “I want to go home!”

  “This is home,” said Joan.

  Meadoe opened her eyes, fingers digging into the chair. “Did I say that out loud?”

  Joan looked at her thoughtfully. “I think we’ve covered enough ground for today. But I’ll tell you what, when we meet again I’ll want to know what you are really afraid of.” Joan closed the notebook and put it in her briefcase. She put on her jacket. As Meadoe opened the front door for her, Joan said, “Meadoe, there’s two kinds of people who say they don’t think about sex—the ones who do and lie about it, and the ones who do but repress it.”

  August 1, Saturday Afternoon: The Wallpaper

  Standing on the porch, her arms filled with contact paper to line the kitchen drawers, Medoe fumbled with the lock. The new deadbolt resisted turning at first, then suddenly released. Meadoe imagined for a second someone on the other side had twisted it for her. The radio played the oldies station where the announcer said, “And now Glenn Miller and his band playing ‘Boulder Buff,’ featuring Billy May on trumpet.” Uneasy, she looked around the room. It wasn’t like her to leave the radio on. Nothing in the living room was out of place, the back door was securely locked, and the windows were latched.

  She sat on the edge of her bed to kick off her shoes. For fourteen years she’d lived in the apartment two blocks from the library. In this new setting, her own furniture looked changed, as if someone had stolen her belongings and replaced them with clever counterfeits. Even the air felt alien and smelled strange.

  The bed felt good though, so she flopped back. A dozen chores waited. More unpacking, setting up the telescope, but her motivation was shot. Is it true, she thought, that I’m thinking about sex all the time and don’t know it?

  Through the uncurtained window, the afternoon sun cast a square of warm light on her legs. She was trying to make patterns from the swirls and texture in the ceiling plaster when she noticed the wallpaper in one corner had peeled away from the wall. Changing the wallpaper topped her project’s list, so she levered herself out of bed, slid a stool under the corner and pulled off the first layer. Several sheets stuck to it. The room’s history unpeeled in wallpaper. Under a pale yellow, a horrible brown and white geometric; under that, a green marble pattern; under that, a solid pink. The base wasn’t wallpaper however. After clearing several feet—the paper fell away easily—she stood back. A movie poster: The Outlaw, starring Jane Russell and Jack Beutel. No date, but old, and the paper was laminated to the wall. Licking her finger, she rubbed at a spot, cleaning it. A varnish, she guessed.

  A half hour later, all the wallpaper lay crumpled on the floor, and an entire collage was visible: from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, posters, magazine covers, newspapers and pin-ups, carefully arranged, varnish protected, in beautiful condition. Hand drawn scenes: girls in bathing suits and war planes: whoever assembled the display was an artist. Life magazine pictures of models on beaches: July 9, 1945, a dark-haired woman wearing a striped two-piece suit, her hand to her brow as if looking into the ocean; April 17, 1944, Esther Williams standing in front of a giant sea shell; Rita Hayworth sitting on a towel, August 11, 1941. The magazines cost a dime. Other Rita Hayworth images, mostly from movie magazines including a Time Magazine painting of her, one hand over her head, her other behind her as if the artist had caught her in a twirl, her dress billowing, showing a lot of leg. Ingrid Bergman looked doey-eyed on a Casablanca poster, but most of the women she didn’t recognize: Martha Raye, Betty Grable, and Maureen O’Hara. Unfamiliar movies: Four Jills in a Jeep, Destination Tokyo and Haunted Honeymoon. In the background, the radio announcer talked about “our boys in the Pacific.” Meadoe cocked her head to listen, but a song started, “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” She rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled.

  To one side, surrounded by war news, a striking drawing of a Japanese woman pursing her lips at a microphone, a rising sun flag behind her. Bare shoulders, half turned, the flag snapping in a wind. Underneath, the card read, “Tokyo Rose.” Meadoe touched her own face whose high cheekbones and slanted eyes were mirrored in the drawing. Of all the drawings, this was the best. More life—a sensuousness in the mouth, in the twist in the neck.

  “He did a lot of work here,” she said to herself. Clearly this was the effort of a young boy. Pin-up girls and war
photos. She looked for dates. Nothing past July, 1945. Everything was vivid, though. No fading. The display must not have been up long before being covered. Why?

  The setting sun touched her neighbor’s roof; she glanced at her watch. There was time to set up the telescope for a little early evening viewing. Tomorrow she could tackle the collage’s mystery.

  Once the sun set in the back yard, the air cooled quickly and mosquitoes buzzed. Meadoe slapped at her bare leg as she tightened the viewfinder bracket that held the equatorial mount. The counterweight nearly slipped from her hands when she maneuvered it onto the shaft, but soon she was making the fine adjustments to the viewfinder and the clock drive.

  A breeze rustled the lilac. Meadoe rubbed her arms. In the moon’s sterile light, the neighborhood metamorphed into a black and white photograph. Shadows too black to peer into. Trees without color. She thought again about the pictures on her bedroom wall, and turned to look at the house. Gray, moonlit shrubbery rustled. Moon reflected off the back door. The pale green siding now looked white. Meadoe rested her hand on the telescope, at ease for the first time in several weeks. Moving’s stress had taken more from her than she thought. It would be a relief to return to work.

  She brushed her fingers over the telescope’s thin metal, an old friend. They’d spent hours untangling the universe’s many twined lights. As long as she had the telescope and the night sky, she’d never be truly unhappy, regardless of whatever Joan said about unacknowledged desires. She chuckled in relief.

  Then, a movement caught her eye. She stayed her hand on the telescope. Had something behind her bedroom window shifted?

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving now. Standing stone still, she studied the window. Was that a reflection off wavy glass? Or was it a face looking out? Her eyes froze open; she couldn’t take them off the image. Had she locked the front door? She knew she had, or at least she was pretty sure she had. She always locked the door when she came in. Of course, she always turned off the radio when she left, but hadn’t it been on when she came home?