Hero

by Paul Butler

  This was simple. Mr. Smith might need a job. I look into Elsa’s frank stare and in the communal spirit of all that is unspoken between us, I know this is as much my responsibility as hers. Who do we both know who is doing well enough to hire?

  The question sends a spasm of panic through me. I avoid her eyes for a few moments, surveying the interior’s beams and the odd shadows they cast, the whispering mother and grown-up daughter by the entrance, the white-faced young couple in the dim alcove beyond Elsa’s shoulder. The place seems like a forest of long-dead trees. We are all like ghosts of the once wooded land, unable to move on to fresher habitation.

  Elsa’s suggestion, if I have understood her correctly, is as unthinkable as jumping into a bath of boiling water. I know my husband well enough to imagine the expression of deep betrayal that would be etched upon his face should I lobby him to bring the war into his workplace. And yet it is so entirely logical I can’t think of a single rational argument against it. Simon has work to give. The legless veteran needs work.

  “It must be terribly frustrating,” I say at last, as though Mr. Smith’s problems are really consuming my thoughts. “I wonder there isn’t an institution somewhere…” My cheek stings with sudden heat, and I despise the toad-like creature inside me who is busily preparing my husband’s alibi.

  I catch a slight deepening of Elsa’s frown, a twitch of the shoulders and a half-turn as though disturbed by a presence behind her. Then a look comes into her face that is more curious than disparaging. “He’s twenty-eight years old, Mrs. Jenson,” she says. “Forty or fifty years in an institution is a long time, even if one could be found to take him.”

  I nudge my cup and saucer away with my fingertips and move back in my chair, surprised at a sudden urge to tell her everything—my husband’s moods, his nightmares, my own helplessness—some of which she no doubt guesses anyway, living under the same roof, breathing the same atmosphere, experiencing the same silent static before or after a disagreement. Conversant as she might be with the entrails of our marriage, her close proximity to our family makes these subjects all the more forbidden. If I whisper a truly personal word into the light of day, Simon at least would expect Elsa and I to part. And loyalty is a tiger that has never departed my heart. I have to take his wishes seriously.

  “I suppose it must be a desk job,” I say, defeated, aware that I am a razor’s edge from acknowledging some theoretical connection between Mr. Smith’s predicament and my husband’s business. “I can’t think what might be available in that line,” I add, making it even worse.

  “Surely most jobs can be done sitting down, Mrs. Jenson,” Elsa says in a low voice. “At least you’d think after all that’s happened the world might arrange it that way.”

  “You would think so, yes,” I say, touching the cool metal clamp of my purse, longing for one of Simon’s Turkish cigarettes, which I never smoke outside the house. I feel like a traitor, evading Elsa’s steady, hopeful gaze. Why is it so out of the question that I should ask my husband whether he has a job for a man who has lost both his legs? Anyone would think the bond between them—same regiment, same battle—would cement such a plan, at the very least make him approachable on the subject. What makes Elsa and I more like friends— albeit rather timid ones—if not a sense of shared experience and destiny?

  “My husband…” I pause, my fingertips still touching the purse clamp, “does not talk about the war. You might have noticed.”

  Elsa nods slightly and colours. “Yes,” she says, her upper lip becoming pale from the pressure of her front teeth. I sense she is battling with herself not to continue. At last she loses the struggle. “But there really would be no need to mention it, would there?”

  I feel the turning of a lock somewhere deep in my chest, and I am trapped. The fire that has been my companion these last seven years intensifies. The smoke thickens and rises. You wanted a heroic role to match that of your betrothed, a mocking voice whispers in my ear. Well, here it is for you. Feelings you must respect but don’t understand. Demands that pull you in opposite directions. The voice brings me back to the night Simon came to me, smelling of whisky, an all-too-familiar scent now. I remember how I strapped and fastened the armour of self-sacrifice upon myself. Who was I vowing to save all those years ago? Whose burden—that of Simon or that of Mr. Smith—was I taking on? I used to believe that it was the same burden. I had no way of knowing my husband would turn against his companions.

  I can help a drunken man. I can put him to bed, soothe his nightmares, withstand his rages, but this feeling of being torn is more than I ever bargained for. The heroism I envisaged has become ugly and lopsided because it requires me to shut out the world I had set out to help. It requires me to help my husband turn enemy to himself. And here before me is Elsa—my twin whose passion for peace and healing grew in the same fiery womb—who hopes and expects me to act for Mr. Smith. And I know she is right. I know that in protecting my husband from his own rage, I am merely helping him to betray his kind. A flame leaps and scorches the inside of my brain as I think of the battle that will inevitably arise between Simon and me when I broach the subject. It is nothing compared with the volcano that will erupt when I give him the news from Dr. Hopkins. It will be Lucy all over again. Rarely could the genesis of a child have been greeted with such anguish. But I have time, a month or two anyway, and I must take each battle as it comes.

  The look I am giving Elsa, I suspect, is defeated, helpless, but assenting, as I detect a familiar figure weaving through the tables towards us, a rag doll with bright orange hair under her arm.

  “Darling!” I exclaim, turning to embrace her, taking in the scent of soap and young flesh. The doll-less arm reaches across my waist and grips. “Where is Daddy?”

  “Parking the car. He dropped me off first.”

  There is something knowing, almost world-weary, about her tone when she talks of her father, a dull weight of inevitability in the short phrases she chooses to voice. I steal a glance over the table at Elsa, whose head is tipped to the side. Her expression shows an inscrutable blend of concern and interest.

  “What happened at the doctor’s?”

  She draws back from me and stares into my face for an answer. I’m momentarily unnerved.

  “Nothing, dear. Just a checkup.”

  “What does he need to check?”

  “Oh …pulse, temperature, that sort of thing.”

  She seems to weigh the answer, her eyes wandering around my face.

  “And was it all normal?”

  I take the hand that has fallen from my waist.

  “Yes, completely normal.”

  She is motionless for a while. Then she asks, “Daddy never goes to the doctor, does he?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Elsa

  Having scuttled on ahead, Lucy stops at the bakery shop window. She gazes through the glass while absent-mindedly gnawing at a strand of her rag doll’s hair. A freak similarity between the colour of the string hanging from her lips and the locks of my own late husband, Jack, makes the sight irksome and I wonder how long I can take it before I start haranguing her about hygiene and growing up. For the moment I restrain myself as I nearly always do. At least she’s a little more like a child, now that’s she’s away from Mr. Jenson.

  I can’t help but wonder what they are talking about— husband and wife—now they are alone in the dim little restaurant. Mrs. Jenson couldn’t have failed to notice the smell of spirit on his breath, or the glassy look in his eye, both acquired, apparently, while parking his car. I sensed real fear from his wife earlier when I pressed her regarding Mr. Smith’s situation, which I may well have misinterpreted from the hundred or so words I exchanged with him. This only occurred to me as I was leaving the Beehive with Lucy. I went through my conversation with Mr. Smith and realized he hadn’t once mentioned either a job or a lack of one.

  I had been distracted by the men in overalls painting the bandstand. It had all seemed so cheerful—me with the ice
creams, the red and blue paint shining under the late June sun—until the reason for these labours suddenly occurred to me. A cool breeze made me shiver, and I turned to see that Lucy had parked herself on the park bench beside the man with crutches. One of her hands was besmirched with grime and I had to wipe it away vigorously before letting her have her cone. I fell into conversation with the veteran, small talk that was interrupted suddenly when I saw Lucy had picked up one of his crutches in her small hand and was using it to try and trip up passersby. I snapped it back and, turning to apologize, met a smile that seemed rueful rather than embittered.

  When Lucy asked why he needed the crutches, Mr. Smith told her plainly, without shame and without a hint of self-pity. Stirred by some indefinable guilt, I blushed and mumbled to Lucy something about the great sacrifice made during the war by “the gentleman,” and by her Uncle Charles.

  Rolling a cigarette, Mr. Smith questioned the word, his calm speech enveloping me, but miraculously evading Lucy, who had already begun to gaze off at the ducks. “Sacrifice implies both willingness and foreknowledge,” he said. His voice, though gentle, carried the vibration of distant cannon fire. He has actually been there, I thought. He has lived through the horror that robbed the world of my brothers, that robbed me of Jack. Every murmur carried a quiet, irrefutable authority. He didn’t need to say any more. With one swift sentence he had wiped the word “sacrifice” from my lexicon of war. It was an untruth, a politician’s word, one among many that floated in the atmosphere and crouched upon the newspaper page. We were allies already.

  Mr. Smith knew who Lucy was, and told me he had served with Mr. Jenson. My imagination, or presumption, did the rest. Was it the scent of stale tobacco that hung about his clothes that made me think of hunger, boarding houses, long days that unemployment renders absent of meaning? Regret stirs in me now. Perhaps I have served both Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jenson poorly by trying to force the issue over tea. Maybe I have merely risked wounding the pride of Mr. Smith—though hopefully he may never know of it—and have burdened my employer, my sister in adversity, to no purpose.

  We are both missionaries, Mrs. Jenson and I, as surely as if we carried tambourines and marched through the street. We focus our energies on the charity of healing—Mrs. Jenson through her marriage, me through whatever potential for “good works” crosses my path—but find ourselves most often merely picking at the scabs of war. When my own neurosis can find no immediate outlet, I feed hers instead.

  This is what happened in the Beehive, I realize. As I leaned over the table urging a solution to a problem that might or might not exist, I felt a warning tug inside me. Who was I to interfere? As poor Mrs. Jenson babbled of institutions, the murmur of voices in the Beehive receded, and I thought I caught the fragment of an exchange behind me.

  “Would that impress you?” a man’s voice murmured. “Of course it would,” came the reply, voluptuous in feminine compassion.

  I felt a warning, a swirl of unease. I noticed the woman’s hand reaching to cover her beautiful beetle-shaped brooch, and I pitied her, who seemed to regard the idea of wealth in our age as tasteless.

  When we first met in the haughty tea room at Selfridges, I kept looking over her shoulder, waiting for the real Mrs. Jenson to turn up. Though handsome in her faded way, with her reddish hair and fine-boned face, she was not how I expected a rich woman to look. Her dress and cardigan, though delicately stitched, were coloured neutrally as though their wearer desired nothing better than to fade into the upholstery of her chair. And this is probably what she did want. She was so still, and so quietly spoken, she might have fit in perfectly as one of the teachers I worked with in St. John’s.

  For each of Mrs. Jenson’s sidesteps regarding Mr. Smith I had a ready answer. He’s too young to be institutionalized. He can work sitting down. No need to mention the war. I was armed and marching, tambourine in hand. There was no turning back now.

  Catching up with Lucy, I pull her gently away by the wrist. She follows easily enough, though her eyes remain on the giant gingerbread man with the cherry buttons down his front. Even as we walk away she spins her head one way and another so as not to lose sight.

  “Come along, Lucy. You want to see the park. It’s a beautiful day.”

  How many times has this platitude escaped my lips, and how many times have I cringed inside? There are no beautiful days. Jack is dead. What remains of his young face and his auburn, wavy hair is under the soil of Belvedere Cemetery in St. John’s. My brothers are gone the same way, and their bodies—either invaded by steel or torn asunder by explosives —lay an ocean from their country in Beaumont-Hamel. Flu and tuberculosis swept away my parents, but a breath of wind might have taken them just as easily. “Flu” and “tuberculosis” are merely the medical terms for heartbreak.

  The sun may be shining upon the cobbles. The cotton wool clouds may be breaking into blue, and sylph-like young women in their frocks and pale stockings may be wafting through the streets as though this were Paris and not some provincial British town. But the scene is a cruel mirage. There have been no beautiful days since the madness began nine years ago, since sensible men and boys gathered in herds and hurrahed on the banks of Quidi Vidi Lake—a stone’s throw from the cemetery fence that would in a few short seasons encompass their mortal remains—since they all threw their hats into the air in unison, a rippling sea of human excitement at the foreign adventure due to overtake them.

  It all seemed harmless enough at the time. Ashamed as I am to remember it now, I even felt a tingle of anticipation at the stories Jimmy, Michael, and Jack might tell around the stove in the months to come. I can’t deny that even then it occurred to me something was wrong, that the tinge of excitement might harvest a terrible response. A frozen spring and the martyrdom of a young and soulful Noah were fresh enough in memory and apt enough in detail too, as men kitted up for war, rather than the hunt, and got ready to be shipped. But what had seals to do with Germany? Except, of course, that it felt the same.

  A veritable army of marching insects, they seem to me now, cheered on by their insect wives and sisters, an accumulation of limbs with no self-directing brain, no queen, no one to whom a question can be asked when the disaster of mass annihilation is complete.

  I couldn’t stay in Newfoundland after the war. When all my people were buried, parents too, I knew I could not live in a place that could be gutted of its young through the twitch of a government pen so far from our shore. A fire burned inside me, and I was startled by its heat—it was anger, determination, self-destruction if need be, but not despair. What happened, I knew, was wrong, fundamentally so. I knew the wrong spread far beyond my island home. But for Jack, Michael, and Jimmy, and the many others like them, it was different. How could I live in a place that would so happily divulge itself of any real choice in such life-or-death matters? Newfoundland no longer existed for me. It was merely a distant dream, a failed idea. I could no longer see the point of it. I had to go to where an ocean did not lie between decisions and their consequences. Not that I myself had any chance of affecting such things materially. I had no such illusions. But at least in England a foot soldier could pass by a general in the street. At least a British politician made decisions regarding war and peace; he didn’t defer to his counterpart in some other place. In England the destiny of women and men was connected, by some loose and convoluted thread, to some kind of awareness of cause and effect. And with the suffragette movement crashing through the obstructions at last, there was even more hope. Women were the soft underbelly of war: it was among women that the shock and grief was absorbed; it was women who discussed in whispers the undiscussable; it was women who questioned the very notion of war. The world was on the brink of change, and change would happen here first. I was too impatient to wait.

  This is what I thought at the time, and when I arrived in London and attended the sparsely attended public lectures— “Woman and Protest,” “A War to End All Wars?”—there was a faint, encouraging stir. On
the way home from one of these, in Soho, a poster loomed down at me from a side street wall, a dark and terrifying image of a cadaverous, white-faced young man in leotards surrounded by dagger-like shapes, either distorted leaves or flying shrapnel, or perhaps both. Above the picture a claim read: Europe’s Greatest Achievement in the Art of the Motion Picture: The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Again I felt a tingle of destiny. The thin man in the leotards looked a little like Jimmy, his pronounced, skull-like jaw and sunken eyes. His expression—at once blank and fevered—corresponded with my fear regarding the state of mind of my husband and brothers during the last weeks of their lives. Who else did the oppressed creature on the poster depict if not the soldier? Where else did the distorted landscape full of rapier shadows and insane angles represent if not the battlefields of Europe? I felt that the illustration was talking directly to me. The lectures together with the promise of this exotic, disturbing new art persuaded me I was inching closer to my destiny.

  But soon the lectures ceased through lack of interest and, if truth be told, no little fear. The venue was near a public house, and the regulars found out we were holding pacifist meetings. Windows were broken and messages were scrawled on the out–side walls. The owner, a London university, would no longer rent us the space. Mr. Eaves, the kindly, round-shouldered man who introduced the lectures, gave me an apologetic shrug, took my address, and promised to pass on any information should he find a new venue.