Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  Group F finally got through their scene without laughing and were hurried off the stage. The woman with the clipboard called for G, and Liz, Sally, and Barbara climbed the steps onto the stage.

  “Who the hell is reading Maurya?” the director said. “Jesus, there’s not a Maurya in this group. Elaine! What the hell are you doing, giving me three daughters?”

  “The brunette is reading for Maurya,” the woman with the clipboard said defensively. “She insisted.”

  “Shit,” the guy said. His accent was long gone. Of course, he’d been peevish to start with, after the gigglers.

  “Just let me try it,” Liz said, uncomfortably conscious of her voice evaporating into the theater’s empty spaces. She took a breath and found her diaphragm. “One time through. I promise not to laugh, at least, when they bring in the body.”

  The man just looked at her. She tried to meet his gaze steadily, a tricky thing with the footlights in her eyes. He hadn’t taken his feet off the back of the chair in front of him, which left him looking impossible to please. An asshole, Liz thought, a perfectionist trying to fake a softer edge, and a bit of a megalomaniac. They’d probably end up friends.

  Finally the guy shrugged and made a what-the-hell, the-night-is-circling-the-drain-anyway motion with his hand.

  “Go,” he said.

  AND SUDDENLY it was simple. It was amazing, how instantly it all came back. The desultory onlookers scattered through the dimness of the seats beyond the footlights, the smell of the varnish and the floor wax and the must of the heavy burgundy curtain, the peeling tape on the floor marking the forgotten points of old productions—it all disappeared, and she was there, simply, in the close stone cottage lit by lamps, above a thrashing sea with waves shattering on the rocks below, with her last son wrapped in a piece of sail on the rough table, dripping still, while the neighbors knelt and crossed themselves and keened, and her daughters wavered, torn between their own grief and their fears for the final thread of their mother’s sanity.

  The accent was easy. Mike’s father slipped into a brogue after two Manhattans, and Liz had always had a precise ear and the gift of echo. It wasn’t a matter of inflecting every word, in any case, it was just the music of it, and a few crucial vowels. The emotions were the same, really—there was no need to make anything, or do anything, no need for elaborate imaginings and cunning technique. You just let go and sank into the unspeakable reality of it. You just got raw and real and waited for the line to rise on its own broken wings.

  She knelt at the table that wasn’t there, beside the daughters older than herself, on a spring night in Virginia, and grieved her dead son, and his dead brothers, and their lost father, her husband, and that father’s father before him.

  They’re all gone now, and there’s nothing more the sea can do to me….

  Barbara, as Cathleen, let out a piercing shriek and began to sob, a bit petulantly, as if she’d spilled something on her prom dress. Liz heard titters from the dim seats. Sally, as Nora, was playing it closer to the ground but still fluttering distractingly, crossing herself and muttering a Hail Mary that wasn’t in the script.

  And it didn’t matter. They would do what they would do, as the world would, as the sea itself would, and it was out of her hands, as it had always been. She was ancient, and she was forever, and soon enough she’d be in the white pine coffin herself, with the last of the wood they’d saved up for their men. She was broken finally and at last and completely, and the peace beneath the suffering began to glow and sing.

  I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting the one on the other. I’ll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening….

  The theater had grown quiet. The director’s feet were finally off the back of the chair in front of him, and the women chattering in the back of the auditorium went silent. In the wings of the stage, the women in group H stopped their own muttered rehearsals and attended, as Barbara’s Cathleen keened on, ridiculously, and Liz went on, low and strong and spent.

  It isn’t that I haven’t said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn’t know what I’ld be saying; but it’s a great rest I’ll have now, and it’s time, surely. It’s a great rest I’ll have now, and great sleeping in the long nights after Samhain, if it’s only a bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking.

  WHEN THEY WERE FINISHED there was the usual polite smattering of applause. Group H had hurried in from the wings before Barbara, Sally, and Liz were even off the stage, and the woman playing Nora was earnestly explaining something complicated to the director, some brilliant twist. The director was ignoring her.

  “Thank you, ladies, very well done,” he said to the trio of Group G. “We’ll be in touch with you by Thursday, one way or the other. Make sure Elaine has got your numbers.” And he put his feet back up on the seat and gestured to the group on the stage: Go.

  “Asshole,” Sally muttered as they went up the aisle toward the exit.

  “You get the sense he likes his small pond,” Liz agreed.

  Barbara stopped to get her purse and blow her nose, and Liz and Sally both gave her a smile and then, in tacit understanding, went on without her.

  “The Hail Marys were a nice touch,” Liz said.

  “Thanks,” Sally said. “You were great. I wish I’d had the guts to read for Maurya.”

  “It’s not guts,” Liz said.

  They passed through the doors and into the night. The balmy air was a surprise; Liz realized she had half-expected a cold wind with the teeth of the sea in it.

  “I can’t believe I’ve got to sit by the goddamned phone until Thursday,” Sally said.

  “He’s not going to call us,” Liz said. “The one he’s sleeping with will be Cathleen, the one he wants to sleep with will be Nora, and the old pro in the red sweatshirt will be Maurya.”

  “Maybe he’ll let us carry the damned guy in on the sail or something,” Sally said. “I’d play one of the dead bodies, I swear, if they weren’t all guys. I’m just trying to get my foot back in the door, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Me too.”

  “You want to stop for a drink or something? My babysitter’s good till eleven.”

  “Mine too,” Liz said. “I’d love to have a drink.”

  [ PART NINE ]

  In the evening of life,

  you will be examined in love.

  JOHN OF THE CROSS

  CHAPTER 31

  LABOR DAY 1968

  THEY HAD TAKEN the high ground, and the flanks were covered. To the east, beyond a line of dunes, lay the ocean, which they would leave to the Navy. With marsh to the west and impassable shrubbery to the north, the only viable approach to the main campsite was from the south, and they had dug a series of foxholes and established clear lines of fire and an FPL. The supply line was tenuous, a half-mile walk to the little general store, which could be brutal if you forgot your flip-flops and had to skitter barefoot along the hot pavement; but there were always beanie-weenies. On the whole, Mike thought, their situation at the Cape Hatteras National Park campground was reasonably secure, and he thought he could risk having a beer.

  “Looks good,” he told his platoon COs, Danny and Chevy Petroski. “Call in the sergeants and squad leaders for a briefing. We’ll figure out the watches and LPs and secure for the night.”

  “Aye, sir,” both boys said, and Danny saluted.

  “Don’t ever salute anyone in the field,” Mike said automatically. “It just makes them a target.” His son looked so distressed at this that Mike added gently, “A salute is a sign of respect, and the way you show respect in the field is by paying attention to each other, keeping each other alive, and getting the job done. You see?”

  Danny nodded
. Chevy said, “Are you allowed to say ‘sir’?”

  “Yes sir,” Mike said. Chevy grinned, but Danny still seemed a little downcast, and Mike felt his heart hurt. His older son had developed some baffling depths over the last year, places he went inside himself where Mike couldn’t find him yet. They were still feeling each other out.

  He said, “Did you guys hear the one about the kangaroo?” They shook their heads. “Kangaroo hops into a beer joint, hops up to the bar, and orders a drink. Bartender says, ‘That’ll be twenty bucks.’ It seems a little steep to the kangaroo, but he’s thirsty and he reaches into his pouch and pulls out a twenty, and the bartender pours him a cold one. The kangaroo starts drinking the beer, and after a while the bartender says, ‘You know, we don’t get many kangaroos in here.’ And the roo says, ‘At twenty bucks a beer, I’m surprised you get any.’”

  The boys laughed. “Now go get your brothers,” Mike said. “It must be about time for chow.”

  The two ran off in separate directions. Angus was on patrol somewhere toward the swamp, and probably in it by now; Lejeune was in the fire control bunker near the shrub line, arranging and rearranging the fireworks they’d bought at the traditional roadside stand near Barco, and shooting off the occasional bottle rocket at a target of opportunity. Ramada had unfortunately been killed in the first assault on the main dune, but he’d taken it well and was off somewhere now playing with Deb-Deb.

  Mike, who had been squatting in the command foxhole while they talked, took the opportunity to stand up and stretch his leg. The left knee was never going to be the same. He could feel rain coming now, by the ache in it. He’d always thought that was an old wives’ tale. So maybe he was an old wife now.

  He walked back toward their campsite, taking it slow on the sandy path. If he walked with particular attention, he didn’t have to limp. He could feel the action in his knee with every step, steel on bone; if it was very quiet, he could even hear it sometimes. Like a squirrel in a cage, spinning its wheel in a tiny creaking circle of pain.

  Chevy and Lejeune came running in from the left flank and fell in on either side of him. Mike put a hand on each boy’s shoulder, and they walked on together. The two of them were excited about the fireworks; Lejeune had everything set up in some particular sequence, to be fired as soon as it got dark enough, and they were working out who was going to get to shoot off what. It all seemed fair enough so far, unless the girls wanted to get in on it, which seemed unlikely, and Mike let the boys plan it out on their own, nodding at the coolest ideas. He’d stay close once the shooting started and make sure they did it right.

  He hadn’t been prepared for what it felt like to be with Larry’s sons; that loss was finally real. Every time one of them grinned or made a crack, every time one of them did something outrageous and then just stood there looking at you when he got nailed for it, with that placid, slightly wicked Petroski gleam that said it had been worth it and he was prepared to take whatever the consequences were, Mike thought of all the times Larry and he had promised each other that if one of them bought it, the other would step up with the kids. He was the godfather to each of these boys, as Larry was the godfather of all his children. Except Anna. And if there was a heaven beyond the flowers and the crap, Larry was more than a godfather to Anna now.

  Mike shook his head, wondering if he was getting soft. Thinking of heaven, for Christ’s sake. Taking comfort in such a notion. But there was no place else to go, with certain deaths. It was that, or turn to stone, or drink yourself to death. Larry would have understood. One more Marine reporting, sir; I’ve served my time in hell.

  They rounded the corner, and the campsite came into view. Liz and Maria were sitting at the picnic table beneath a sprawling ocean cypress, drinking something pink. Lejeune ran ahead toward the women, but Chevy stayed close, and Mike firmed up his touch on the boy’s shoulder. He wanted to say something. Chevy had flunked fourth grade, spectacularly, and then flunked summer school without ever completing an assignment, and Maria was close to despair. But Mike knew the kid was all right. He was just pissed off, and he had Larry’s complete and utter disdain for bullshit. He would be fine. And it was no tragedy, to be a year back, on the whole. It would help him when the school sports started up; he’d have an edge.

  Mike said, “Do you remember that time at the obstacle course in Quantico, when Lejeune fell off the rope and broke his ankle?”

  “Yeah,” Chevy said, a bit uneasily, prepared to be defensive. That Saturday on the Marine physical training course had passed into both families’ lore: Larry and Mike had gone on ahead, blithely, racing each other, leaving the older boys with their younger brothers on one of the manageable obstacles, the short platform leading to a sandpit, for practicing parachute landings. Chevy had been eight years old then; Danny had been seven, Lejeune six, and Angus four. The sandpit hadn’t held the boys’ attention long, and they inevitably had moved on to tougher obstacles. Somehow Lejeune had gotten himself twenty feet up the big climbing rope, the one without the knots, and then had panicked and let go. A cluster fuck, any way you looked at it; a classic boys-will-be-boys episode, from the command level on down. Maria and Liz had given everyone hell that evening when they all got home from the emergency room.

  “You kept your head that day,” Mike said. “You got your brother’s leg stabilized and kept everyone calm, and you sent Danny for help while you stayed with the younger boys. You kept your cool.”

  Chevy nodded, still not sure where he was going with it.

  “And we all got in a bunch of trouble,” Mike said. Chevy laughed, relieved. Mike said, “But your dad was so proud of you that day. Did he tell you?”

  “I don’t remember,” Chevy said. “I don’t think so.”

  “He told me,” Mike said. They were close to the campsite now, and he stopped and squatted down to get his eyes level with Chevy’s, feeling his knee scream, getting past that.

  They were silent a moment. Chevy was looking down at his bare feet, digging his toes deeper into the loose sand. He looked pained and defiant, as he always did when Larry came up. Like nobody understood but him. There was probably some truth to that, Mike thought.

  He said, “How do you think Lejeune is doing right now, with your dad gone?”

  “He’s sad,” Chevy said. “He cries a bunch, like, all the time. Not just about Dad, either. Stupid stuff. And it’s like he’s gotten scared of everything. He’s scared at the pool, he won’t go in the deep end. And we have to have a light on now when we go to bed. I can’t sleep with the light on, but we have to leave it on because Lejeune is scared. And if I do anything, he tells Mom.”

  “What about Ramada?”

  “Ramada doesn’t get it,” Chevy said contemptuously. “He’s just a little kid. He’s sad, but he still thinks Dad is going to come home.”

  “And your mom?”

  “She’s sad too. And mad, a lot of the time.” He met Mike’s eyes, a flare of the old Petroski defiance, and said frankly, “Mostly at me, because I keep screwing up.”

  Mike said nothing. He could feel his heart, or maybe it was that place half an inch away, the scar tissue in his pectoral muscle that was as far as the shrapnel had gotten. He could find his heart in his chest now by following the wounds.

  He said, “There was this poem your dad loved, by a guy named Kipling. I guess I’m thinking of it because he quoted it to me that day you kept your cool with Lejeune getting hurt. I don’t know the whole thing by heart, like your dad did, but I remember the lines he said that day he was so proud of you. He said, ‘If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too…’”

  Chevy was silent for a moment, then said, “Then what?”

  Then, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, and—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  “I can’t remember the whole thing, like your dad could,” Mike said. “I
know he had the book somewhere. I’m sure you could find it.”

  BACK AT THE PICNIC TABLE, the tribe was gathering for supper. Kathie and Temperance were showing Lejeune the mass of shells they had collected, both girls flirting wildly and then giggling between themselves. Ramada and Deb-Deb were bent over two bottles of soda and a row of paper cups, like chemists, using their straws to mix different proportions of the strawberry and the grape. It was all coming out more or less brown, but they seemed happy enough with the results.

  Chevy ran to the cooler for a drink of his own. Maria, who had seen them stopped up the trail, gave Mike a questioning look, and he smiled back, All good.

  Liz had a beer already out for him, with his evening pills laid out neatly beside it. Two aspirin for the low-grade pain, though he was trying to ease off the pain medication entirely and just suck it up; penicillin because his damned spleen was still screwed up; and anti-malaria pill, antipneumonia pill, and antimeningococcus pill, because the penicillin didn’t cover everything.

  Mike picked up the beer, leaving the pills in the cup, and went to stand beside his wife.

  “Where are our boys?” Liz asked.

  “Angus has gotten into the swamp, I’m afraid.” She gave him a sharp look, and he laughed. “Danny’s on it. They’ll be back soon.”

  She still looked dubious, but he put his hand on her tanned shoulder and she snuggled in close under his arm. She was wearing an orange one-piece bathing suit with red vertical stripes; she wouldn’t wear a two-piece any more because of the scar. It had taken weeks, this time, before she was willing to let him see her body at all. Not like his previous deployments, when she would farm out the kids to a friend for his return and they would have sex in the front hall the moment they were through the door, and sex halfway up the stairs, and sex in the kitchen, and in the shower, and their clothes would be scattered around the house wherever they had managed to get them off each other. They’d been like virgins this time. Liz had cried every time he took his shirt off—she still did—and kissed the scars, the new ones first, and then the old ones; and when Mike had finally gotten to her naked belly one night with all the lights out, he had found her cesarean scar by touch, and kissed it, and felt the smooth deep groove fill with his own tears, like a dry riverbed after a rain.