The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

“Don’t you think you are overreacting to this just a little?” Clara doesn’t reply. “I mean,” he goes on, “can’t we at least discuss …”

  “Discuss what?” she asks. “I don’t feel inclined to discuss anything at all with you, Mr. Steichen. Unless you would care to manhandle me again as you did before,” and she holds out her arm to him, crooked, elbow foremost. Her eyes on him are sharp, illuminated. “No?” she asks. “Well, then.” She searches in her pocketbook and withdraws her key, then abruptly turns away, hurries up the stone steps and disappears inside the building.

  He stands looking after her. The street is quiet. He can’t imagine trying to sleep right now. His body and brain are still alight, so that the events of the past half hour don’t seem completely real. He can’t stop picturing the way she looked at him as she held out her arm, goading him, daring him to lay hold of it and reveal how far his anger would go. How could he sleep after that? Perhaps he can just wander through the city until he is so tired that he can slip into unconsciousness untroubled. Perhaps he should find a place to get a drink.

  As he begins to walk down the street, he sees something on the pavement almost directly under his feet. He stoops down to look at it more closely. It is a single woman’s glove. When he picks it up and holds it to the light, he recognizes it. It is Clara’s. She must have dropped it as she searched for her keys, though how she couldn’t have noticed it falling—something that big—is beyond him.

  He thinks that he had better take it back to her. If she was indeed serious and intends to depart for New York and, he supposes, to break off their engagement, she will miss this when she is packing. And if her words were only a threat … well, she’ll still miss it. He should still return it to her. Shouldn’t he? He decides to walk around the block, calm down and then go after her. Holding the empty fingers of the glove in his hand, he sets off down the street.

  THE LADY CONCIERGE is insistent, however.

  “No gentlemen visitors in the hotel. What time of night do you call this anyway?” she says.

  “But the young lady dropped her glove. I am only returning it. Can someone go up and knock on her door and tell her that I have it?”

  “At this hour?”

  “Please, madame.” He has run out of arguments. “Please.”

  “Well,” she says, her voice like a door creaking open, “I suppose gloves are an important item in a lady’s reticule.”

  “Yes,” he agrees.

  “Especially in high summer.”

  “Definitely.”

  “I’ll send the maid up to see if …”

  “Miss Smith.”

  “To see if Miss Smith is still awake. Wait here please.”

  She rings and a girl comes from beneath stairs and is given Clara’s room number. He waits, while the concierge eyes him from behind the desk, amused. Running a ladies’ hotel, it must be one of the consolations of her job to see young men in his distraught state on a fairly regular basis. Fortunately, it is only a few minutes before Clara comes downstairs, taking each step one at a time, watching him as she descends. From her eyes, he can see that she has been crying, but otherwise she is still dressed as she was when she left him. He is struck with the conviction that she dropped the glove on purpose, intending for him to find it. She has been waiting up for him to come and return it to her. Her reaction was, at least in part, an elaborate performance, her idea of how a wronged woman ought to behave. It seems absurd, but he is nonetheless convinced that this is the case. When she reaches the foot of the staircase, she holds out her hand to him solemnly. He takes it and feels again energy, anger, desire for her inextricably entangled.

  “May we sit in the front parlor?” Clara asks the concierge.

  “He said he wanted to return your glove.”

  “Only for a few minutes.” The woman nods resentfully and ushers them through into a small sitting room.

  “I’ll be just out here should you need anything,” she says, looking meaningfully at Edward. Then she goes out, drawing the door closed behind her.

  —

  WHILE WAITING FOR him to come, she has been making rules in her head. She can accept it, as long as it was only a single occurrence, not an ongoing affair. And as long as no one else knows about it. And as long as he is genuinely contrite. As long as he agrees not to see this other woman, whoever she is, ever again.

  When the door closes behind that fussy, officious concierge woman and they are alone together, he takes both of her hands in his.

  “Please,” he says. “Let me explain. Hear me out.”

  As long as he never does anything like this again. People, men especially, make mistakes like this out of momentary fancy and make amends for them. And women put up with a lot worse than a man who strays a little once. Rose Beuret, for example; everybody knows the infidelities she suffers; and with women who she must then see when she goes into society. That would be unbearable, Clara thinks, and though she admires Rose for her steadfastness, it is not what any woman would wish for herself.

  As long as she is never brought to their house as a guest or as a friend. As long as whatever he did is hidden, far away, separate from their life together. As long as this is not an omen for the future, she can take him back with her dignity intact. Here he is, standing before her, his face full of pain and concern, and she loves him so much that she is actually quite certain that taking her hand out of his right now and walking away would feel something like dying.

  “All right,” she says. “Tell me.”

  FIVE

  June 12, 1918

  AFTER HIS DISCUSSION with van Horn, Edward set to work right away, scavenging. The British could spare a few cameras and the French could give them developer, fixer, and plates. Next week, if nothing else went wrong, their equipment would arrive from the States. Until then they would have to make do. They could send up some planes, take some images. It was better than nothing.

  Edward could collect the emergency supplies from the depot at Châlons in two days’ time. His plan was to take a car there the following evening, stay overnight and return with the supplies when they arrived the next day. In the meantime, he set the men to work building the developing lab and setting up equipment for the interpreters.

  The war took over objects, turned them to its own purposes. Where before a hill was just a hill, now it became a problem, a weapon or a threat, depending on where you stood. A flat field became a landing place for airplanes. A wood became cover during a retreat. The things of the world weren’t innocent anymore.

  This airfield, for example, had been improvised out of the farm that had stood on this spot before; first the officers’ quarters, lounge and mess were installed in the old stone house, then the pavilion with the airfield offices and the barracks for the men was hastily constructed behind it. The huge canvas hangars that stood to the left side of the field when you faced the pavilion had followed. And now they were starting work on the lab in a building a short distance from the airfield that used to store grain and winter feed, a heavy, stone-walled barn with a corrugated tin roof. In the corners of its two large rooms, they found slippery traces of wheat stamped into the hard earth floor.

  They cleaned, built dry walls for a darkroom on one side, hung lines where the prints could dry. They stationed a mobile acetylene generator outside to give them electricity and light. They carried lumber in from the storerooms, and built long wooden workbenches and a tilted central table to display a photo mosaic of the surrounding region. On the benches they set up the machines that the French had left behind when they ceded this airstrip to the Americans: stereoscopic explorateurs, which Deveraux said looked like the viewers at dime museums; they would show two images laid one on top of the other so they appeared three-dimensional. Then stereoscopic printers, which printed two images onto the same sheet of paper.

  “Why do we use stereoscopic images for reconnaissance?” Edward asked the interpreters, trying to compensate a little for the training they should already have had.
“If you lay two images on top of each other, you get depth. Look at this print.” They all gathered around where he laid it out on the table for them. “See the shadow in the side of this trench here? In a single image, all we’d see would be a slight discoloration in the ground, but if we use double images, we can see that it has height, bulk. It’s artillery, camouflaged so we can’t detect it from the air. How big is it? If we know that, we can guess what kind of gun it is, its range, how many men it takes to fire it. If you know the altitude from which a picture was taken, you can judge the scale of what it shows you.

  “You have to learn to see the meaning in these lines,” he told them. “You have to use the distances you know to measure the ones you don’t.”

  WHEN THEY FINISHED work for the day, Edward went to sit in the officers’ lounge and read the day’s papers. He was just about to turn in for the evening when he heard someone begin playing the piano and then, singing, a rich, pleasant baritone voice. When he looked, he was surprised to see Lutz standing behind the pianist reading lyrics over his shoulder. He didn’t know the song: it was a fox-trot, something popular and romantic.

  After the song was finished, he went over to them.

  “You have quite a voice,” he said. Lutz bowed, his square head bobbing shyly. “Wherever did you learn how to sing like that?”

  “In Iowa, sir,” Lutz replied.

  “Care to be a little more specific?”

  “Des Moines, Iowa.” Lutz looked at him, his face earnestly innocent. “Actually, you know, I was thinking to myself just the other day how much Paris resembles Des Moines. I feel like I’ve hardly left home.”

  “Really?” Edward said, incredulous. He saw Lutz’s face crinkle into a grin. “Lieutenant, I think there is a rule on the books someplace against humor at the expense of a superior officer. Now, seriously, tell me: have you ever sung Mozart?”

  “I know The Magic Flute.”

  “What about The Marriage of Figaro?”

  “Some of the parts.”

  “I like Mozart’s operas, and I haven’t heard any of them sung since … well, in several years. Anyway, if you can remember any of it, another night, it would be good to hear Figaro. And then maybe I won’t book you for disrespect. Good night, Lutz. Get some rest: we’ll be at work again early tomorrow.”

  “I will. Good night, sir.”

  THE OFFICERS’ MESS at lunchtime the next day was full of pilots eating, drinking coffee and smoking, back from their morning flights. Edward got himself coffee and a plate of food and sat down at one of the long tables with Lutz and Dawson. They had been up early and had neglected breakfast, so none of them felt talkative. They concentrated on eating, no sound but their knives clicking on the tin plates.

  “So what unit are you fellows in? Whatever it is, you should tell old van Horn to quit starving you. I’ve never seen anyone scrutinize their potatoes so intently.” Edward looked up and saw that the speaker was a man in a pilot’s leather coat, seated a little way down the table from them.

  “Photo,” said Lutz, his mouth still full. “Observation. You?”

  “Well, well. Our squad’s been assigned to fly with you starting from … when is it?”

  “It was supposed to be today,” said his companion.

  “Yeah, there was some problem, wasn’t there? And now we are kicking around with nothing to do.”

  “Sorry about that. We arrived without the equipment we were supposed to have,” Edward said. “No cameras, ergo no photographs.”

  “Having no cameras is definitely a hitch.” The first pilot to speak wiped his fingers on a handkerchief and offered his hand. “Tom Cundall,” he said. Introductions were made. The other man, the quieter and older of the two, was called McIntyre. He was the captain of the squadron that would be doing the flying for the observers.

  “Where were you stationed before this?” he asked Edward.

  “At St-Omer, for training; this is my first command.”

  “I was at the St-Omer airfield for a while a couple of months back. Who did you fly with?”

  “Man called Knightly.”

  “Yes, I knew him. A good pilot.” He took a swallow of coffee. “So can you tell us when we are likely to start making reconnaissance flights?”

  “Well,” said Edward. “I’m driving up to Châlons-sur-Marne this afternoon to get some substitute equipment that I begged, borrowed and stole. We should be able to send some planes up in two days. At least that is what I told Colonel van Horn, and frankly I wouldn’t want to have to revise that estimate back even an hour. He doesn’t strike me as a man who’d take that very well.”

  “Yep. He breathes fire.” McIntyre chuckled. “You better hope that you don’t get held up on your way to Châlons. Roads can get difficult this close to the line. One day they are there and the next, boom, a big hole instead. Say, have you seen this part of the front from the air?”

  “No, I haven’t. Not yet.”

  “Want to go up this afternoon? I have to go out on an evening patrol, but Cundall here could take you up to have a look around, and land you over at Châlons later tonight. Couldn’t you?”

  Cundall nodded. “No low flying or anything like that. Just to give you the lay of the land.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?” Edward asked.

  “Not at all.”

  Edward thought about it for a minute, then said: “OK. Can I request a particular route? There is one town, quite near here, that I’d like to see from above. If I show you on a map, could you take me over?”

  Cundall nodded. “If it isn’t too out of the way, certainly. Let’s finish our coffee and then we’ll get moving.”

  THEY ASCENDED INTO a day filled with fat, ghostly cumulus clouds, a landscape of fantastic ridges and canyons. Cundall wove among them, climbing to skim their surfaces, or crashing through them so the soundless impact left the small plane and the two men inside it sailing through white, their own wings vanishing above them. Then he would dive down, and when they emerged, Edward could see the dense green world below, clear to the horizon.

  In the distance lay the bright mirror of the Marne, and the rise beyond it, the Chemin des Dames Ridge, and beyond that German territory, the Ourcq River cutting through it, forded by wooden pontoon bridges in several places. Soon, Edward could see the whole line of the front, the bare earth and broken trees, receding layers of trenches, supply lines leading up to them, stopping dead.

  Cundall turned west and flew parallel with the front for a while, from Épernay along past Crécy-en-Brie and on in the direction of Paris. From here the trenches looked nearly empty, and so did the roads. In the middle of the day the men stayed hidden. But there were signs that ammunition and troops had been gathering at the front: tenders and guns that hadn’t yet been properly camouflaged. They were preparing for something over there.

  They saw some British planes nearby, squadrons of Camels flying in formation, and occasionally another two-seater like Cundall’s DH-4. Once, in the middle distance, an Albatros appeared. Cundall pointed to it, a dark X against the white of the clouds. It slipped into a cloud bank and for a few minutes Edward was sure that it would appear suddenly beside them, or under them like a shadow.

  “Will it come after us?” he shouted to Cundall.

  “Not likely. The Huns are outnumbered up here, so they don’t attack if they’re alone, even a big old slow two-seater like this one. Although on a day like this, he could sneak up. We should keep our eyes open. Listen for his engine.”

  Edward thought, Yes: among these clouds, airplanes could appear and vanish like spirits. It was a landscape with no fixed coordinates, with nothing permanent to steer by, nothing solid; to survive, it would be necessary to get good at disappearing.

  Cundall swung the plane around and headed away from the front. They descended until at last they were only 1,000 feet above the ground, and the roads and fields and houses grew back toward their normal size. Now Edward could tell the features of the landscape apart from one another,
and he began to recognize where he was. Here, below them, were the farms outside of Huiry, the village where Mildred had lived, and there was the little town itself, its small main square, the church and the mairie opposite. Then it was gone, and they were flying over farmland again. Pastures full of cattle ran from the noise as the plane passed above them; horses turned uncomprehending faces upward. A road, sand-colored, cut through the fields and wound along the edge of the valley. The shadow of the airplane slid across the ground, stretching and shrinking with its contours. At this height, the sense of speed that had been lost in the vastness of the clouds returned, and the earth slipped underneath them in a blur. They were flying parallel to the road as it mounted the hill, racing up the escarpment toward a small outcropping of trees, horse chestnuts and lindens and there, there, he could see it rushing toward them, there it was: his house, the house he had come up this same rise and seen, its gate hung with the sign Á LOUER so many years before.

  There it was, below him now, and the garden behind it and the crab-apple trees he had planted that second summer, now so tall their upper boughs hung over the walls. He could see the tiny kitchen yard where the children played hide-and-seek, where Clara and their maid, Louisa, hung the laundry, where in autumn he stacked cords of wood. Once, when he was carrying the logs inside, a splinter had slipped into his hand, and he ran cursing into the kitchen until his wife had made him sit down as though he were a child and pulled it out of his forefinger, and then poured methylated spirits on the bloom of blood beneath the nail. He could see the window which had been his bedroom, the windowsill where Clara always put the blue and white vase for flowers, and above, on the third floor, the window of the room his daughters had shared.

  On the side of the house that he couldn’t see was his study, where he’d stored his photographs and negatives when the family had left in 1914. In there, all these small, insignificant, marvelous things from the past were preserved, his memories were made into objects, stacked one on another, filed, locked away to prevent the light from fading them. He wanted to shout to Cundall to land the plane, please, just for a minute or two, let him go down there and drink it in, remember it, because right now he could hardly believe that he used to have a life consisting of such wonderful, ordinary things.