by Tom Miller
“We won! Oh, we won and it wasn’t even close.”
“You won?” I asked.
“The vote! The Senate voted on the Zoning Act last night and it lost—fifty-four to forty.”
I’d been too wrapped up in my own troubles to notice.
“That sounds pretty close,” I said.
“Don’t be absurd, it’s four more votes than we thought we’d get. The Trenchers are going to eat their livers!”
“Well, congratulations,” I said.
“And,” Dar said, lowering her voice, “you sent me two hundred thirty-eight messages.” She crinkled her nose in delight.
“I did?”
“Yes. Since Sunday morning. I’ve been counting.”
That seemed impossible. I hadn’t sent more than—well, a couple an hour for six days.
“I’d get out of a meeting with the Undersecretary of the Interior, check my board, and it would be Senator Larson will def vote nay, and Pls confirm you can meet the wounded veterans tmrw at 8, and Unger on crutches looks like a raccoon on stilts. I swear, I missed a luncheon with the Benevolent Society because of your series on Professor Yu lecturing through the apocalypse: Plague of locusts has jammed slide projector.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Well, from what I hear, that meeting was perfectly useless.”
She tapped her umbrella on the floor to knock the water off.
“Ask me out,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You heard!”
I looked at my feet and shrugged. But nothing I could do would ruin Dar’s high spirits. “My God! Is this because you’re grounded this week? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Everything. Go a whole week without transporting and see how you feel!”
“But I have just gone a week without transporting. I feel wonderful. I forgot how much I like walking.”
“Would you like to go for a walk, then?” I asked.
“It’s rainy and miserable outside. Try again.”
I tried to remember the list of grand things I’d said I’d do when I got to Boston, the thousand destinations I’d dreamed up back in Guille’s Run while standing my night watches. I couldn’t think of a single one.
Dar took my arm. “You’re blue. And why shouldn’t you be? I used to fall into these awful depressions every other week when I was a freshman. Away from home and all alone in the world.”
Embarrassed, I pulled away from her.
“Oh, come on. You can sit at home and brood with your pet raccoon or come out. Where do you want to go?”
“A picture palace?” my inner six-year-old answered.
It was all Danielle could do to keep from howling. “Did you say—”
“Forget it.”
“No! I’ll take you to the picture show. Leave it to me. Come by about eight.”
“I didn’t mean to ruin your day,” I said.
She grinned. “You haven’t. Though you still have time.”
20
The modern prophylactic sigil emerged from discussions and comparisons of forerunners used by thousands of corpswomen during the Civil War. In May 1865, Katie Flynn published it in a broadside titled “A Sigil for the Female Complaint,” which sold for one cent in New York City. By August, committees for public decency throughout the country were burning similar pamphlets alongside “immoral” books containing sigils for ensuring female babies and smokecarving techniques for ending pregnancies.
Victoria Ferris-Smythe, Empirical Philosophy: An American History, 1938
I SHOULD HAVE BEEN elated. Instead, I sulked back to my room, napped away the afternoon, and got up at six, groggy and even crankier than before. I found Unger sitting in the common room, trimming his toenails with a penknife.
“Howdy,” I said.
“Howdy yourself,” he replied. He’d caught my mood earlier in the week, or I’d caught his. Not that we were being any nastier to each other than to the rest of the world.
“Suppose one were going on a date this evening,” I said.
“Suppose one were.”
“What’s the etiquette for accompanying someone to the movie theater?”
“Is it Jake?” he asked.
“No.”
“Because if it is, maybe you could have her say something to—”
“It’s not. Besides, if you’re so wild about Dizzy, go over there yourself.”
“I have. It doesn’t do any good.”
“Well, there are a few hundred other birds in the sky.”
“I’ve noticed,” retorted Unger. He pared a thumbnail. “So, who asked whom?”
“She asked me to ask her. What am I supposed to do?”
He sighed. “How the hell should I know? You could ask Mayweather. Probably you screw at her place instead of yours. Christ, did you hear him last night?”
“No.”
“All night long. There’s a pipe that carries the sound right into my room. It’s obscene.” Unger almost said something else, but stopped himself.
“What?” I asked.
Unger scraped a grain of sand from beneath the nail on his ring finger. “Mayweather was in my group in Essential Sigils today. He came completely unprepared. Not the slightest notion of the red-green sigil’s design or the nuances of its amplification. He tried a couple of draws and even with his damned casual attitude he got it to take forty or fifty percent of the time.”
“And you didn’t?”
“No,” said Unger. “I studied that sigil forward and back, all the variants. Worked it beforehand until I reeked of pine shavings. And he just picked it up in twenty minutes.”
“Freddy—have you gotten anything to work all semester?”
He looked at me with full dark eyes. They said, No. Nothing. Not a thing.
“I’m going to wash out, aren’t I?” he said. “I could be a historian, a theorist, a synthesist. Never a practitioner. But I’m a Contingency and that means come April, I’m either a practical sigilrist or I pay up. I should leave now and save myself the tuition.”
“Don’t say that. Half the trick to sigilry is self-delusion. There’s no reason that if you put a doodle on a man’s chest that he should stop breathing. You stop to think about it and it sounds insane.”
“It sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” Unger said. He finished with his nails and put his knife away. “If she asked you to ask her, take flowers.”
“Okay,” I said. “How might I do that?”
Unger recommended a florist a few blocks away. “How many flowers?” I asked. “And what sort would be appropriate?”
“Who is it?” asked Unger.
“It’s . . . umm . . . would you mind very much if I didn’t say?”
Unger threw up his hands. “God! Figure it out yourself then!”
• • •
I located Unger’s florist, who’d seen his share of lost farm boys over the years and sold me a bouquet of pink and white roses. The fragrance of those hothouse flowers on a chill October evening cheered me and by the time I’d carried them to Dar’s, I was smiling.
“They’re lovely,” said Danielle.
She was lovely, too. Healthy and vigorous, compared to the week before. She wore a high-necked black dress embroidered with red threads like vines of fire creeping up her arms. She offered me the choice between Cleopatra at the Columbia Theater or This Coincidental Life! at the Majestic. Given my mood, she preferred the latter, as it was a comedy of mistaken identity, rather than a tragic love story. I agreed.
We ducked under our umbrellas and headed out. It would have been faster to transport or fly, but Dar was still on mandatory rest and I was grounded. Instead, we packed into a horse-drawn tram in Harvard Square with the rest of the Friday-night crowd.
“I thought you’d be out celebrating with your friends,” I said to Dar, who was wedged into a seat beside me.
“We celebrated last night,” she said.
Dar laid her hand on mine and
I felt electricity shoot up my arm following the same pattern as the one on the sleeves of her dress.
“Patrice was in the delegation with me,” Danielle said. “She kept asking if you and I were together. I told her—”
A girl of about five was standing in the aisle beside us, awestruck, reaching tentatively toward Dar. The smile fell right off Dar’s face.
The waif looked back toward a middle-aged woman standing in the aisle, who nodded encouragingly. “Are you Mrs. Hardin?” the girl asked.
“I’m Miss Hardin,” Danielle replied, looking as if she might climb over me to escape out the window.
“Miss Hardin, were you scared when you were at the war?”
“No,” Danielle said. “It was too dark to be scared. I couldn’t see anything to be scared of.”
The girl nodded. “I’m afraid of the dark.”
Dar fumbled for something to say.
“Are you going to be a philosopher when you grow up?” I asked her.
“My mother’s a philosopher,” the girl said.
“You should come by the aerodrome at Radcliffe,” I said. “We’ll teach you to fly.” Then, remembering that we weren’t permitting even Jesus Christ to go aloft, I added, “After Monday.”
“Could she teach me?” asked the girl, pointing to Danielle.
“No,” said Dar.
The girl’s mother scooped her up and pulled the bell for the next stop. The girl waved to Dar, who reluctantly raised her hand.
The Hero of the Hellespont slouched down next to me. “God, I hate that. At least she didn’t say she wants to be a transporter. Those ones are the worst.”
We rode in silence to Boylston Street, then walked three blocks through the rain to the theater.
The Majestic was everything I could have wished for. Its marquee was lit with more electric lightbulbs than existed in the entire state of Montana. Every piece of molding on the lobby’s ceiling was gilded; every ornament was brightly polished brass. The ushers wore enough gold braid on their jackets to outfit four or five lieutenant colonels each. The seats were plush velvet, thirteen hundred of them. We sat not in the very front row, but close to it. I’d seen a couple pictures projected at the social hall in Billings, but never anything to compare to this. The lights went down, the curtains parted, and the film began to roll, eleven reels in all.
Almost from the first frame, I realized we’d picked a stinker.
“He’s supposed to be a prince?” I whispered to Dar. “He looks about seventy.”
“His throne’s made of plywood,” she whispered back. “Look. They didn’t even paint the back.”
“Professor Yu has a mustache just like the grandfather!”
“Oh, be nice.”
The fearless nobleman, after a steamship voyage on which he was lengthily seasick, reached America, lost his suitcase, and, having very little in the way of English, was mistaken for a distant cousin by a family waiting at the dock.
“Can I hold your hand?” I asked. I’d been working on saying that for the preceding twenty minutes.
“Only during the scary parts,” Dar answered.
“The whole thing is frightful.”
“In that case . . .”
A remarkable thing, the human hand. The infinite number of ways it fits together with another. Fingers interlaced, first with my thumb on the outside, and then rewoven so that hers was. Palm against the outside of a curled hand. Forefinger tracing thumb. Fingers teasing the edges of sleeves. Fingertips circling knuckles. Dar found the calluses along the base of my fingers from my years of holding a regulator. I tested the sharpness of her nails against my forearm.
Prince Louis the Hapless was trundled off to Laredo and put to work on the cigar assembly line. By the fifth time he got his tie stuck in the conveyer belt, the runs of comic notes from the three-man band providing accompaniment had taken on a sarcastic tone. By the tenth time, the musicians gave up any pretense of supplying a soundtrack and struck up “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to widespread applause.
I turned to whisper to Dar at the same moment she was leaning in to whisper to me and the tip of my ear caught in her mouth. Her tongue brushed against my flesh and I let out a sigh that must have been heard three rows away.
“They changed actors,” Dar said. “The innkeeper had short hair in the last scene.”
“That’s not the innkeeper. It looks like the palace again . . .”
“And that’s the Arc de Triomphe. How’d he get back to France?”
The projectionist, as bored as everyone else, had spliced in the final reel two reels early. The one person in the theater riveted by the story got up from his seat to complain and the film was halted as the projectionist attempted to correct the error.
“Someone should give him a medal for trying to cut it short,” I said.
“We should all be decorated for sitting through this,” Dar answered.
While he worked, the projectionist put up a newsreel. The band broke into a well-rehearsed patriotic tune. Beside me, Dar stiffened.
The film concerned “our boys,” the first boatloads of whom had just begun to arrive in France. They marched past in full field gear, smiling and waving for the camera. Some stock footage of artillery blasting away. A map of Europe. Title cards praising their fighting spirit. Then a group of rescue hoverers flying in formation at a speed and altitude that suggested they weren’t within a hundred miles of someone who might shoot at them. Our bold, beautiful girls rush to the front to rescue the wounded! A pyrotechnic explosion, followed by an artfully positioned man with a blood-soaked dressing on his head. A hoverer set down beside him. Most definitely not a regulation skysuit—long skirt, a silken sash from shoulder to waist, boots with heels much too high to be stable. She wasn’t even wearing a harness. Or carrying a powder bag. In seconds, the brave soldier is whisked to safety. (Ain’t he lucky, lads!) The wounded man in a hospital bed, his leg in a cast, getting a kiss on the cheek from the angel who had rescued him.
Then, ranks of women standing at attention in a neatly kept barracks, rows of carefully made cots behind them. It may not be Home, but it’s an Adventure!
“I need to go,” Dar snarled. She rose and pushed her way toward the aisle.
I caught up with her in the lobby. She was pale, eyes shut, lips pressed together, breathing rapidly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You probably don’t want to see that again.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, opening her eyes and trying to smile. “It’s not seeing it. I’m not a neurasthenic case. I didn’t even see anything when I was over there. I didn’t see a battle. I didn’t see a corpse. I didn’t see so much as a rat. Just a lot of friendly Australian soldiers delighted to be guarding a tent full of ladies rather than getting murdered in the trenches. I didn’t get gassed. I didn’t get shelled. Other than the one night, nobody ever shot at me, and even then there were a thousand men standing between me and the bullets. No, it just makes me mad. It makes me furious.”
“That they faked the bits with the fliers?”
“That they put a pretty face on it. And that they put me in one of those newsreels when I came back. They called Gallipoli ‘a bloodless miracle.’ No mention that the supply officer miscalculated my powder and I ran out with one group left to take—eleven hundred New Zealanders slaughtered on the beach for want of aluminum. Nothing about the four corpswomen we lost. And God forbid they admit that half a million men died there over two years. Or that ten million soldiers have died since the start of the war—for what?”
She balled up her fists and for a moment I thought she was going to strike me.
“It’s not the war to end all wars—we’re sending Americans over there to die so that the munitions factories can make a fortune and our allies can grab a few square miles of extra territory. It’s criminal. And the Corps used me to sell it. ‘It’s an Adventure!’ I can’t tell you how many women wrote to say I’d inspired them to do their part for the welfare of humankind. �
�You’ll be pleased to know I left my daughter in the care of my elderly mother and went straight down to the recruiting office.’ ”
“Dar—”
“And while I was getting their letters, the generals were marching me through that ghastly goodwill tour. One hospital after another, all the philosophical wards. Smashed legs, mangled arms, bullet holes, burns. They were all R&E fliers. I saw a lieutenant, blind, all her hair burned away. Her scalp was just a mass of twisted pink scars. She said Rescue and Evac suffers fifty percent casualties, but the Corps won’t let them tell anyone at home. Or they’d never get another volunteer.”
“Fifty percent killed?”
“No, not killed. But injured badly enough that they can’t return to duty. They’re professionals, too, cargo fliers or passenger carriers. If they lose a leg, that’s their livelihood. Hundreds of them.”
“That’s horrible.”
“The generals told me don’t dwell on it, don’t speak out about it—it’ll only hurt the cause. So, I shut up like a coward. But I couldn’t stop thinking: How many women did I put in one of those beds?”
If I’d known Danielle only a little better, I would have taken her in my arms and she would have wept.
“Well,” she said bitterly, “now I’ve gone and ruined your evening. Let’s go back in.”
“Let’s not,” I said. “We should have left one minute into that film.”
• • •
We headed out into the drear. The first streetcar to come past was packed, so we waited for the next. As I watched her, Danielle seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper, remote and forlorn. I didn’t know how to reach her.
We’d been waiting several minutes when a man in a shabby overcoat came up beside us. He peered at Danielle. He had no hat or umbrella and his thick black hair dripped with the rain. He was about forty, stooped and poorly shaven, but with a thick neck and shoulders. He looked at Danielle again, wiping the water from his face.
“You’re her, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Excuse me?” said Danielle.
“You could save so many.” He said it with extraordinary calmness and mildness. Danielle was too taken aback to answer.