* * *
Sheldon graduated in June of 1943. Mirabelle watched him from the bleachers. The day was cloudless and perfect. She wore a red dress with white polka dots and a wide-brimmed hat to keep off the sun. She was joined by three of her friends, one of whom had a sister graduating.
Louis Bouchard had driven down from Canada in his father’s Plymouth.
Their meeting was chaste. He kissed Mirabelle on the cheek while holding one of her hands in both of his.
Sheldon’s graduating class threw their caps high into the air where they soared; half the class fetched them after they landed, and the other half forgot they had existed. Sheldon didn’t care. He was the youngest to graduate, he had a plan, and he was on his way.
He thanked Mirabelle and Louis for coming, kissed his cousin on the cheek, and then promptly vanished. He joined some classmates rather than his family for a meal that night and attended a party where he kissed a girl named Molly, who pushed him into a guest room, inexplicably shoved him into a closet, and then closed her eyes and slid her right hand down his pants.
* * *
The next day Sheldon was up and packed. Uncle Nate was back at work, but his ambition and social climbing days were over. Only forty years old by the calendar, Nate was already deep into middle age. His wife and son had died. His daughter would soon be gone, and he had no capacity to remarry; though eligible, he lacked any reserves for generous love.
Nate was drinking coffee and reading the papers.
“So,” Sheldon said, trying to get his uncle’s attention, his green duffel bag full of money sitting beside a sack of clothing and a jacket.
“Good morning,” said Nate. His voice was flat. He had not been to the graduation ceremony, had not seen Mirabelle with Louis, and had not watched Sheldon receive his diploma with high marks. “Well done yesterday.”
Sheldon didn’t take his uncle’s absence from the graduation personally. He knew it would have revived memories his uncle couldn’t bear.
Sheldon drew a deep breath and said, without preamble, “Thank you, Uncle Nate.”
“For what?” Nate said, not looking up.
“For taking me in when Dad died. For giving me a home. Thank you.”
“Oh.” Nate lowered his paper. He looked away, as though remembering a distant conversation about a once-important topic. “Yes. You’re welcome.”
“I’m going back now,” Sheldon said. “Unless you need me and want me to stay.”
“To Whately? There’s no house there anymore.”
“Yeah. I’m going to rebuild. Not the same house. More of a small cottage, I think. I’m going to stay with Lenny and the Bernsteins while it gets built. They said it’s OK. Lenny’s got one more year, and then we’re going to head down to New York. I figure I can maybe use the cottage later.”
“You have money for this?”
Sheldon had forgotten that he didn’t officially have money for this. Luckily, Nate wasn’t thinking critically these days.
“You can use your insurance money,” Nate said.
“What?”
“The insurance money. From the fire. It’s been in escrow. I was going to give it to you when you turned eighteen, but I see no reason why you shouldn’t have it now.”
“I don’t understand, Uncle Nate.”
“Your parents’ house in Whately was insured against fire and arson. The insurance company paid out when those brothers were arrested and convicted. It’s a touch under three thousand dollars. Twenty-seven hundred, as I recall. It should be more than enough these days.” Nate seemed more engaged now with a less emotional matter to address. “Maybe instead of using the money to pay for the building costs, we could talk to a bank and arrange a loan. You could take out a mortgage at two percent or so—I could cosign it because you’re a minor and my credit is excellent. We could invest the remaining capital in war bonds. If you can make the payments to the bank with either your work earnings or the dividends from the investments, you should be in good shape. With some equity in the land and the cottage, you could come out of this in a strong position ten years from now when you’re a young man and ready to marry. Whately may not be a big draw, but Northampton is a college town, and after the war ends someday, people will want to live nearby. Europe will be weak after the war, and we’ll be strong. The economy will surge.” Nate seemed to come to a conclusion for both of them. “Yes. This is a good idea. A respectable investment with ties to your heritage. Let’s do that.”
Sheldon looked at his uncle. He had no idea his father had insured the house. The depths of his connection to the past never seemed to end.
What the conversation made Sheldon think about was the seven thousand dollars in cash he’d stolen from Thaleman. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to be thinking bigger. Maybe when he turned eighteen, he could repeat his uncle’s model but maybe with a place in New York City. Move in with Lenny. Find a job while Lenny told jokes. It was a good idea. He felt a sense of possibility.
Of course, when he was eighteen, he’d have to enlist. But when he got back . . . New York City.
“The bus leaves for Massachusetts in an hour, Uncle Nate. I’ll come back to visit in a month or so. We can do all those things you talked about. I really appreciate it.”
“Yes.” Nate paused. “Goodbye, Sheldon. Good luck.”
* * *
LOUIS BOUCHARD’S GRANDMOTHER had handed him the ring and begged him to find a “nice girl” and settle down and find happiness in small things. She spoke to him in Québécois; a language in which the vowels were more rounded, the slang unique, and the enunciation more distinct than the language of their French cousins.
“What if she isn’t so nice? What if she’s fabulous and dangerous?” he had asked her.
“It’ll either be much better or much worse,” his grandmother had correctly concluded.
A good marriage proposal, he knew, was daunting. In the Royal Canadian Air Force, “getting it right” had been easy to define. There was a right way to prepare a plane for flight, to fix an engine, to prepare for takeoff, to fly in formation, and to approach a bombing target. There did not seem to be a right way to propose marriage, though. In the military, things were the right way precisely because they led to predictable and anticipated results. It was harder to do things the right way with people, since the same acts can lead to different outcomes.
Mon dieu.
Louis wanted to propose someplace pretty, someplace memorable, someplace that would later invite a romantic retelling so all the girls would swoon when Mirabelle recounted the moment. Louis hoped that their grandchildren would listen to the story and believe that they could lead lives as beautiful and rich and loving as their grandparents had.
There were practicalities, though. He also needed a place that worked in his favor in case she was uncertain; he didn’t want to spook her. It needed to be serene and not too intimidating.
The place he chose was Mystic, Connecticut, and the occasion was the opening to the public of the last of America’s wooden whaling ships, the Charles W. Morgan.
Louis had been reading the American newspapers since arriving in Hartford. As Sheldon and the other graduates had been milling around on the field before the series of interminable speeches that always accompanied these events, Louis sat reading the Hartford Courant, which contained an article about the ship.
Mystic, to Louis, was the kind of place he was looking for. The name was idyllic and the black-and-white photographs suggested a quiet coastal village typical of New England. The ship was the last survivor of the once great American whaling fleet that had numbered more than 2,700 ships once upon a time. The Charles W. Morgan, he learned, was built in 1841 and had traversed the entire globe. The ship had survived the hurricane of 1938 when it was moored in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and she had sailed to Mystic a month before Pearl Harbor. To Louis, the Charles W. Morgan was a beast born to hunt, but in her maturity, she had become a symbol of resilience that was put to rest in a pl
ace of beauty.
This sounded like Mirabelle. Strangely enough, it sounded like Abe too. And the more Louis considered this, it sounded a little like Sheldon as well.
A strange thought.
He put down the paper and looked at Mirabelle as the mortarboards were hurled into the air, and she turned to him and smiled.
* * *
Louis and Mirabelle were engaged in Mystic in July of 1943. Mirabelle watched Louis kneel on a stone by the harbor and offer her the ring. Mirabelle looked at it and marveled at how the exchange of such a small rock could alter fate, a tiny stone in the flow of time that changed the course of an entire river. She looked down at him and knew that there was a kind of happiness waiting for her, the kind she had been longing for since her mother had died. It was also the kind that took her away from everything that might bind her to an identity she didn’t choose but was born into. A circumstance. A condition. A fate.
Abe had embraced it and had become victim to it and died. Sheldon was grappling with it even now. Mirabelle, however, thought she might have found a way out of a bad dream.
She looked at the ring and Louis looked at her.
When she was little, Mirabelle would hold things in her dreams. A leaf, a stone, a teddy bear. The things seemed absolutely real in her dreams and they were something she wanted. She would hold on to them so tightly that she was certain beyond certainty that they were in her possession. When she woke, though, she always found them gone. It never felt like they hadn’t existed. It felt like they had been stolen or ripped away at the last minute. The idea that they had never been there at all, that they had only been figments of her imagination, was too outrageous to believe.
One day a new thought came to her: Why would she have held on to them so tightly if she didn’t already know they were illusions?
There, in Louis’s outstretched hand, was such an object. A small and glittering stone. This time, however, she was not gripping it and trying to drag it across to another universe. This time it was being offered to her, as though the world were asking for her hopes to be true.
“Yes,” Mirabelle said.
Part of her was very certain, the more childish part that wanted to prove the world wrong. The other part, the adult in her—the part of her that knew everything was temporary and that only death was real—wasn’t so sure.
“Yes,” she said again. “I will marry you.”
* * *
They debated marrying at a church or synagogue, in America or Canada. They chose to marry on a beach in Massachusetts in September. Mirabelle wanted a chuppah to cover them, the Jewish symbol of a new home being created. Sheldon and Nate, barefoot on the beach, would hold two of the four poles that supported the canopy.
They found a pastor (the fourth they asked) willing to perform an interfaith and strangely liberal marriage. Louis’s parents were stoic through the process, holding their tongues because their son had survived the war and Nate Corbin’s son had not. They were hesitant about the marriage but were wise enough to see that Mirabelle was a vision of grace and femininity and sexual power and against that—as mere parents—they were nothing.
It was a doomed marriage, they believed. A doomed promise in a world at war.
But what of it? What isn’t?
After the ceremony, Sheldon approached Mirabelle and hugged her.
“Mirabelle Bouchard,” he said. “You’re finally French.”
1944
ON JUNE 6, 1944, THE ALLIES invaded northern France and regained a foothold on the Continent. In September of that year, when Sheldon finally turned eighteen and was planning to enlist, the tide of the war had irrevocably turned. The Allies had already liberated Florence and Paris, and the war didn’t need him anymore.
This was exactly what the same officer said to Sheldon at the recruiting station in Springfield after he had recovered from the shock of seeing Sheldon again.
“You might be the only guy in America who has tried to enlist for this war twice,” the officer said, adjusting his glasses and shaking his head.
“I read about the death camps,” Sheldon said. “I can shoot a bobcat at four hundred yards in a storm at dusk. Germans are bigger.”
“The war’s going to be won. It’s going to be over soon.”
Sheldon, at eighteen, was taller, stronger, and had even less respect for authority than he’d had a few years ago, but like Abe, he thought he could tolerate it if there was something worthwhile on the other side of obedience.
“Why are you always in my way?” Sheldon asked.
“That’s not polite or fair,” said the man, though his tone lacked conviction.
“It’s a serious question. We’re at war. It’s not over. I’m eighteen and I want to fight. Let’s fill out some paperwork,” Sheldon said, tapping the table.
“You’re 4-F, Mr. Horowitz. I didn’t tell you that last time because I didn’t want to break your spirit. I needn’t have worried, obviously, but there it is. We don’t need you. And more to the point, we don’t want you.”
Sheldon had no idea what that meant and said so.
“It means you’re medically unfit.”
Sheldon looked down at his stomach. He didn’t feel unfit. A little shorter than some of the monsters he’d seen in the recruitment posters, but he was hardly unfit.
“That’s not the kind of fit I mean. I’ve got your file. You have medical issues that disqualify you. You know that.”
Sheldon stood like a statue and was completely confused. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You are clubfooted, for crying out loud. It says so right here in your file. Both feet. Born that way. You can walk, but you can’t run and never will. Your father submitted the paperwork to the senior medical officer here in Springfield”—he checked another page—“in April of 1928. You weren’t even two years old yet. My hunch is your father understood war and mortality better than most, and wanted to get things on record early in case anything came up. Now it has. It’s highly unusual, but people with shell shock have been known to be jumpy about the prospect of future wars and . . . so there it is.”
Sheldon disappeared from the officer’s view for a moment and the very next moment Sheldon’s right foot was up on the desk.
They both examined his perfectly normal right foot.
“The other one,” said Sheldon, “is exactly the same as this one except for being completely different.”
“Huh,” said the man.
“Huh is right,” said Sheldon. “I can chase you around the parking lot if you need more proof.”
The man looked back down at the papers. They had every signature and every stamp imaginable. He looked at the medical officer’s name again and then looked up.
“Why did you come here?”
“What do you mean?” Sheldon asked.
“To Springfield.”
“I live in Whately. I’ve been there for more than a year.”
“Now you do. The last time you were here you lived in Hartford. Why did you leave Connecticut to come up here in 1941 and try to enlist in Massachusetts? There’s a recruiting station in Hartford. You could have walked there.”
“My uncle told me to.”
“He did, did he.”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You didn’t find that odd?”
“I found the Japanese bombing us odd. And Hitler declaring war on us odd. To be honest, Springfield didn’t make the cut.”
That was all he needed. The recruiting officer was ready to solve the puzzle for them both.
“Your father called in a favor when you were born. He must have known a military doctor here who was willing to build up a file on you and make sure it was found if you ever tried to enlist. Why he thought you might enlist I have no idea.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sheldon said. “I was born in 1926. The war was over for seven years by then and we didn’t get into a new one until 1941. Why would my father have pulled strings for me when I wasn’t e
ven two years old yet?”
“Were you close?” he asked Sheldon.
“Yes.”
“Always?”
Sheldon’s shoulders grew slack. “Yes,” he said.
“I didn’t know your dad,” he said. “But I know that a man sees a war and doesn’t want his son to see it. That makes perfect sense to me. Someday you might have a son and you’ll be torn between serving your country or saving him. Your father made sure you would never see enemy fire. That should make you feel—”
“Don’t tell me how that should make me feel!” Sheldon said, slipping his foot back into his sock and shoe. “My father didn’t know the Nazis were going to exterminate every last man, woman, and child who was born exactly like us! He didn’t know I’d grow up to be one of the able men standing between them and death. He was a hunter and a trapper, and I grew up hunting and trapping. He loved me, I get that. More than you will ever know. But there’s a job to do, evil is on the march, and my feet are fine! Change the paperwork, please.”
The man shook his head. “No.”
“What do mean, ‘No’? What kind of recruitment office is this?”
“I mean no. I mean doing that means getting a medical examiner down here. And if I do that, he’s going to see this file—”
“Throw it away. Start fresh.”
“That’s a felony, and I could be court-martialed. In fact, whoever doctored these papers could be court-martialed too. The man who signed off on these papers—and, no, I will not give you his name—must have owed your father a favor, and I’m guessing it’s because your dad saved his life or something equally serious. We don’t talk about it, but military men keep a ledger in their heads. The idea is to come out even by the time we cross the finish line one way or another. If there is any honor in war, that’s it. It’s often the best we can do, and it’s the only thing within our control. Now as it happens, I don’t owe you a damn thing. So, I’m not risking my career to send you to the front in a war that’s almost won. It’s too late to liberate Paris and get laid. I suppose there’s still Berlin, but trust me, it won’t be the same.”
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 32